I had a Tourette’s period. And obsessive compulsive disorder. Things would get in my brain that I couldn’t get out of my brain. – Richard Ford
The art of living your life has a lot to do with getting over loss. The less the past haunts you, the better. – Richard Ford
I haven’t scoured Dixie out of my voice. But I don’t think that the books that I have written… have really in any way been Southern in character. – Richard Ford
America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people’s rights and their sense of patriotism. – Richard Ford
The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me. – Richard Ford
I decided early on that I wanted to participate in the greater American experience, rather than the parochial one in Mississippi. But I have an urge as a writer to meld the Southern experience into the larger American one. – Richard Ford
I don’t hate children. My wife and I just didn’t think we would be good parents, and also by the time we got married in 1968, we were pretty nose-down toward what we wanted to do, and having a child was going to be an excuse to fail. – Richard Ford
I’ve been mainly a happy boy in my life. I married the right girl and we did what we wanted to do. – Richard Ford
I work really hard at these books, and when colleagues write nasty reviews of them, I take it very personally. – Richard Ford
It’s interesting to leave a place, interesting even to think about it. Leaving reminds us of what we can part with and what we can’t, then offers us something new to look forward to, to dream about. – Richard Ford
In order to write novels for a living – it’s not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I’m working on. – Richard Ford
Well, I believe in the idea of ‘normal’ in the way that I believe in the idea of logic. Or the idea of character. All of these ethical constructs are just that: constructs. – Richard Ford
Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can’t tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do. – Richard Ford
There’s a lot to be said for doing what you’re not supposed to do, and the rewards of doing what you’re supposed to do are more subtle and take longer to become apparent, which maybe makes it less attractive. But your life is the blueprint you make after the building is built. – Richard Ford
My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I’ve never done. Also, I’m a person whom people talk to. – Richard Ford
I have a theory… that someplace at the heart of most compelling stories is something that doesn’t make sense. – Richard Ford
