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A Reader Is Entitled To Believe What He Or She Believes Is Consonant With The Facts Of The Book. It Is Not Unusual That Readers Take Away Something That Is Spiritually At Variance From What I Myself Experienced. That's Not To Say Readers Make Up The Book They Want. We All Have To Agree On The Facts. But Readers Bring Their Histories And All Sets Of Longings. A Book Will Pluck The Strings Of Those Longings Differently Among Different Readers.

-Richard Ford

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A Reader Is Entitled

Richard Ford

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A Reader Is Entitled To Believe What He Or She Believes Is Consonant With The Facts Of The Book. It Is Not Unusual That Readers Take Away Something That Is Spiritually At Variance From What I Myself Experienced. That's Not To Say Readers Make Up The Book They Want. We All Have To Agree On The Facts. But Readers Bring Their Histories And All Sets Of Longings. A Book Will Pluck The Strings Of Those Longings Differently Among Different Readers.

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Being A Slow Reader Would Normally Be A Deficiency; I Found A Way To Make It An Asset. I Began To Sound Words And See All Those Qualities - In A Way It Made Words More Precious To Me. Since So Much Of What Happens In The World Between Human Beings Has To Do With The Inconsideration Of Language, With The Imprecision Of Language, With Language Leaving Our Mouths Unmediated, One Thing Which Was Sensuous And Visceral Led To, In The Use Of Language, A Moral Gesture. It Was About Trying To Use Language To Both Exemplify And Articulate What Good Is.

When I Write A Novel I Start Each Morning By Reading For 20 Minutes.

Writing Is The Only Thing I've Ever Done With Persistence, Except For Being Married.

Love Isn’t A Thing, After All, But An Endless Series Of Single Acts.

At The Exact Moment Any Decision Seems To Be Being Made, It's Usually Long After The Real Decision Was Actually Made--like Light We See Emitted From Stars.

Any Rainy Summer Morning, Of Course, Has The Seeds Of Gloomy Alienation Sown In. But A Rainy Summer Morning Far From Home - When Your Personal Clouds Don't Move But Hang - Can Easily Produce The Feeling Of The World As Seen From The Grave. This I Know.

Most Things Don't Stay The Way They Are For Very Long. I Take Nothing For Granted And Try To Be Ready For The Change That's Soon To Come.

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.

Obsessive Compulsive

I Know You Can Dream Your Way Through An Otherwise Fine Life, And Never Wake Up, Which Is What I Almost Did.

I Started Reading Literature At 17 Or 18, And I Felt This Extra Beat To Life.

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

If You Lose All Hope, You Can Always Find It Again.

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.

The Thing About Being A Writer Is That You Never Have To Ask, 'am I Doing Something That's Worthwhile?' Because Even If You Fail At It, You Know That It's Worth Doing.

If Sportswriting Teaches You Anything, And There Is Much Truth To It As Well As Plenty Of Lies, It Is That For Your Life To Be Worth Anything You Must Sooner Or Later Face The Possibility Of Terrible, Searing Regret. Though You Must Also Manage To Avoid It Or Your Life Will Be Ruined.

There Are More People In America That Love Guns And Want Guns For Themselves And Everyone Else Than There Are Not. It Is Also True That Liberals Who Don't Want Guns Are Puny By And Large. They're Not Risking Anything, All They're Doing Is Saying They Don't Like Something. Liberals Are Quick To Say This Should Happen And This Should Not Happen, But They Don't Do Anything About It Much.

I Have A Theory... That Someplace At The Heart Of Most Compelling Stories Is Something That Doesn't Make Sense.

Something Will Be There When The Flood Recedes. We Know That. It Will Be Those People Now Standing In The Water, And On Those Rooftops - Many Black, Many Poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And It Will Be New Orleans - Though Its Memory May Be Shortened, Its Self-gaze And Eccentricity Scoured Out So That What's Left Is A City More Like Other Cities, Less Insular, Less Self-regarding, But Possibly More Self-knowing After Today. A City On Firmer Ground.

I'm Intrigued By How Ordinary Behavior Exists So Close Beside Its Opposite.

At Heart, Of Course, A Story Itself Is Consolation's Instrument.

Construed As Turf, Home Just Seems A Provisional Claim, A Designation You Make Upon A Place, Not One It Makes On You. A Certain Set Of Buildings, A Glimpsed, Smudged Window-view Across A Schoolyard, A Musty Aroma Sniffed Behind A Garage When You Were A Child, All Of Which Come Crowding In Upon Your Latter-day Senses -- Those Are Pungent Things And Vivid, Even Consoling. But To Me They Are Also Inert And Nostalgic And Unlikely To Connect You To The Real, To That Essence Art Can Sometimes Achieve, Which Is Permanence.

My Job Is To Have Empathy And Curiosity For Things That I've Never Done. Also, I'm A Person Whom People Talk To.

Tweet, Tweet, You're Alive, You Ignorant Asshole.

Someone Wanted Me To Write A Profile For Espn About The Commissioner Of Baseball, And I Said, "he's Just Some Suit! Some Republican. No!" I Mean If You Want Me To Write About Baseball, Boxing Or Football, I'll Write About Those Things Because I Watch Them, I Think About Them A Lot And I Like Them. But I Don't Want To Write About Barry Bonds.

I Realized I Loved You, And I Didn't Want To Be Married To Somebody I Didn't Love. I Wanted To Be Married To You. It Isn't All That Complicated.

If Trump Was Just A Piddly-ass Little Hotel Owner Some Place, Having The Kind Of Character And Manners That He Has, He Would Not Be Worth Our Notice. But Because He's Now Been Based To This Huge Stage, Then His Dimensions Become Immense. He's Not A Tragic Figure Because He Doesn't Have The Capacity To Be Tragic. But The Consequences Of His Life And His Self Now Are Immense; They're Threatening To The World And To The Sanctity Of Human Life.

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?

To Write You Had To Read So I Backed Into Reading.

For A Time After My Divorce Everything Began To Seem Profoundly Ironic To Me. I Found Myself Thinking Of Other Peoples' Worries As Sources Of Amusement And Private Derision Which I Thought About At Night To Make Myself Feel Better.

Paul Ryan's Just A Really, Deeply Evil Little Creature. But He's Not Little; He's Actually Quite Tall, I'm Sorry To See. I'm Always Sorry When Really Bad Guys Are Tall.

I Think That's The Thing That Memoir Can Do More Than Anything It Does; It Testifies And Bears Witness To The Existence Of People Whose Lives, Pleasures And Virtues Would Never Have Been Testified To Without My Having Done It. That Makes Me Really Glad.

They May Already Know Too Much About Their Mother And Father--nothing Being More Factual Than Divorce, Where So Much Has To Be Explained And Worked Through Intelligently (though They Have Tried To Stay Equable). I've Noticed This Is Often The Time When Children Begin Calling Their Parents By Their First Names, Becoming Little Ironists After Their Parents' Faults. What Could Be Lonelier For A Parent Than To Be Criticized By His Child On A First-name Basis?

I Think Once You Love Somebody, You Love Somebody; That's Just How It Is.

I've Been Mainly A Happy Boy In My Life. I Married The Right Girl And We Did What We Wanted To Do.

My Father Died In My Arms. That's Tumult. That's Everything Exploding.

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I Wouldn't Be A Very Good Writer If Someone Hadn't Taught Me How To Read.

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Fear And Hope Are Alike Underneath.

When People Realize They Are Being Listened To, They Tell You Things.

I Want Saner Gun Laws. I Think All These Automatic Weapons Should Be Banned, Big Clips And Handguns Should Be Banned. As Far As I'm Concerned, Shotguns And Hunting Weapons Are All That We Should Allow In America.

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I'm Kind Of A Distractible Guy.

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You're Only Good If You Can Do Bad And Decide Not To.

Theres A Lot To Be Said For Doing What Youre Not Supposed To Do, And The Rewards Of Doing What Youre 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.

Very Early You Come To The Realization That Nothing Will Ever Take You Away From Yourself.

You Can't Always Go To The Well And Have Things Be Funny.

If Loneliness Is The Disease, The Story Is The Cure.

The Pace Of Life Feels Morally Dangerous To Me.

Some People Think That Writers Are Innately Solitary And That There's A Kind Of Romance To That Solitariness. I Tend To Think That What Writers Really Want To Do Is Get Accepted Into Things. They Want To Get Accepted Into Society, Into Culture, Into Intelligentsia, Into The Fun. Writing Is Their Mechanism, Their Instrument, For Doing That.

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Only Sometimes You Can't Feel Anything About A Subject Without Hypothesizing Its Extinction.

For, How Else To Seize Such An Instant? How To Shout Out Into The Empty Air Just The Right Words, And On Cue? Frame A Moment To Last A Lifetime?

Americans Don't Have Saner Gun Laws Because Most Americans, Including Those Citizens Who Puzzle Over Better Angels, Don't Want Saner Gun Laws.

Things You Did. Things You Never Did. Things You Dreamed. After A Long Time They Run Together.

The National Rifle Association Is A Domestic Terrorist Organization That Tacitly Supports The Killing Of Children More Than It Supports Reasoned Gun Legislation.

Some Idiotic Things Are Well Worth Doing.

I Get Very Involved In The Internal Logic Of Sentences.

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Most Things Don't Stay The Way They Are Very Long.

Take Nothing For Granted

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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.

Maybe I'm A Serial Regional Writer. First Here, Then There, Across The Map.

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With Imagination, You Can Put Something Where Nothing Was.

Maturity, As I Conceived It, Was Recognizing What Was Bad Or Peculiar In Life, Admitting It Has To Stay That Way, And Going Ahead With The Best Of Things.

I Went To College To Study Hospitality. I Quickly Got Out Of That And Realized That What I Liked To Do Was Write.

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.

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