Writers Write Is All About Writing
Writers Write Is All About Writing
Richard Ford

Literary Birthday – 16 February – Richard Ford

Happy Birthday, Richard Ford, born 16 February 1944.

Richard Ford Quotes

  1. Writing is the only thing I’ve ever done with persistence, except for being married.
  2. Today I think of characters—actual and literary characters— as being rather unfixed. I think of them as changeable, provisional, unpredictable, decidedly unwhole.
  3. 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?
  4. I wouldn’t be a writer just for myself. If I were going to do something for myself, I’d do something else, something more practical and pleasurable, and probably easier.
  5. Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that.
  6. I want to write about dramatic, important things that engage my sympathies. That’s been the most certifying thing in my life—that I’ve gone toward where my sympathies led me rather than toward where social pressures or convention might’ve led. That’s good luck for a novelist.
  7. You can’t write … on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.
  8. I’m always interested in words, and no matter what I’m doing—describing a character or a landscape or writing a line of dialogue—I’m moved, though not utterly commanded by an interest in the sound and rhythm of the words, in addition, I ought to say, to what the words actually denote. Most writers are probably like that, don’t you think?
  9. If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.

Read: Richard Ford’s 10 Rules For Writing Fiction

Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story writer. He has written nine novels, and five short story collections. His best-known works are the novel, The Sportswriter and its sequels,  Independence Day, The Lay of the Land, and Let Me Be Frank with You. In 2023 Ford published Be Mine, his fifth work of fiction chronicling the life of Frank Bascombe. He writes about lonely and damaged people. He has behaved controversially towards the authors, Coleson Whitehead and Alice Hoffman, after they negatively reviewed his books. His memoir, released in 2017, is Between Them: Remembering My Parents.

Source for Image: Arild Vågen, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_Ford_at_G%C3%B6teborg_Book_Fair_2013_01.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: Literary Birthday Calendar

Posted on: 16th February 2013
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