Literary Birthday – 10 April – John M. Ford
John M. Ford was born on 10 April 1957 and died on 25 September 2006.
John M. Ford Quotes
- Creating the fictional background for a game world isn’t significantly different from creating a background for fiction.
- Every book is three books, after all; the one the writer intended, the one the reader expected, and the one that casts its shadow when the first two meet by moonlight.
- I long for the simplicity of theatre. I want lessons learned, comeuppances delivered, people sorted out, all before your bladder gets distractingly full. That’s what I want. What I know is what we all know, whether we’ll admit it or not: every attempt to impose the roundness of a well-made play on reality produces a disaster. Life just isn’t so, nor will it be made so.
- The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating.
- There are readers who want every point to be clearly and unambiguously set forth, and there are those who want to pry ideas and meanings out for themselves.
- I’m very happy that the New York Times has spoken well of my stuff; who wouldn’t be? But it’s not a choice I made.
- Sometimes the reader will decide something else than the author’s intent; this is certainly true of attempts to empirically decipher reality.
John M. Ford was an American science fiction and fantasy writer, poet, and game designer. Ford composed poems in complicated forms and blank verse. He also wrote pastiches and parodies of other authors and styles. He won World Fantasy Awards for both his novel The Dragon Waiting and his poem ‘Winter Solstice, Camelot Station’, and he won the Philip K. Dick Award for his novel, Growing Up Weightless. He was seen as a young adult author who used the science fiction genre to write mystery stories, full of human drama. He enjoyed using literary devices like alternate history.
Source for Image: David Dyer-Bennet, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:JohnMFord_2001_ddb.jpg
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