Richard Ford

Stop searching. Face the earth where you can. Literally speaking, it’s all you have to go on.

Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace out there there exists an urgency — a chaos — , an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end life as we know it but for the fact that this very story is written, this order found, this style determined, the worst averted, and we are beneficiaries of that order by being readers.

Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.

If there's another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they're over, and that has to be enough.

Just exactly what that good life was — the one I expected — I cannot tell you now exactly, though I wouldn't say it has not come to pass, only that much has come in between.

Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences.

I don’t look in mirrors anymore. It’s cheaper than surgery.

Our sympathies are most required when they seem least due.

You're only good if you can do bad and decide not to.

It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a
tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?

It was on such a night as this that the unhappy things came about.

Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.

Some things can't be explained. They just are. And after a while they disappear, usually forever, or become interesting in another way. Literature's consolations are always temporary, while life is quick to begin again. It is better not even to look so hard, to leave off explaining. Nothing makes me more queasy than to spend time with people who don't know that and who can't forget, and for whom such knowledge isn't a cornerstone of life.

I don’t, after all, know what’s wrong with him, am not even certain anything is, or that wrong isn’t just a metaphor for something else, which may itself already be a metaphor. Though probably what’s amiss, if anything, is not much different from what’s indistinctly amiss with all of us at one time or another – we’re not happy, we don’t know why, and we drive ourselves loony trying to get better

You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.