Richard Ford Quotes

The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences. Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.

Opinions can't be inaccurate.

I don't know why people see the things that they do. I wouldn't pay to see them, they don't touch me or move me in any way.

The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.

If you want to know someone's story, they have to tell it aloud. But every time, the telling is a little but different. It's new, even to me.

When we believe or say we have been offended, we usually mean we feel insulted, mistreated, snubbed, or disrespected. And certainly clumsy, embarrassing, unprincipled, and mean-spirited things do occur in our interactions with other people that would allow us to take offense. However, it ultimately is impossible for another person to offend you or to offend me. Indeed, believing that another person offended us is fundamentally false. To be offended is a choice we make; it is not a condition inflicted or imposed upon us by someone or something else.

Pleasure and pain spring not so much from the nature of things, as from our manner of considering them. Pleasure, especially, is never an invariable effect of particular circumstances.

Nonfiction narratives are really powerful and valid in themselves. But one thing that you don't get sometimes from the more clinical or academic books or nonfiction books is that you don't get to hear the person's voice; you don't get them as individuals. You get a few quotes and you hear them as sort of a case study: numbers, examples, anecdotes, maybe a paragraph here, and that's about it.

The fear is not real, Dil Bahadur; it is only in your mind, like all other things. Our thoughts form what we believe to be reality.

Sometimes, despite the fact that you're reading through masses of material, you just can't not think about a certain event, for it seems to capture the reality of the entire situation so much better than any set of statistics.

The good thing about movies is that they're subjective. You can connect to different themes depending on your own perspective.

What's given, in fact, always depends on the person or thing it's given to. A minor incident in the street brings the cook to the door and entertains him more than I would be entertained by contemplating the most original idea, by reading the greatest book, or by having the most gratifying of useless dreams. If life is basically monotony, he has escaped it more than I. And he escapes it more easily than I. The truth isn't with him or with me, because it isn't with anyone, but happiness does belong to him.

Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.

What happened to me by myself felt partly dreamed, partly imagined, definitely shifted and warped by my own fears and wants. But who knows? Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.

In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.

The movie on the screen is always going to be different from the movie in your head. How it makes you feel is what I'm after, what I'm chasing, and what I'm trying to construct.

People make their own reality. That was what Praxis had taught him years ago. A hundred people can witness the exact same event, and give two hundred and three different accountings of it.

What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.

I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.

We tell specific stories about ourselves to ourselves and we're all the heroes of our own lives. But you live through certain experiences with other people, and sometimes they have very different takes on what happened.

"Don't believe me, don't believe yourself, and don't believe anybody else." Don't believe me, because what I say is only truth for me. Don't believe yourself, because most of the time what you tell yourself is only truth for you - especially when you tell yourself that you're not good enough, you're not intelligent enough, you're not beautiful enough - when you reject yourself before anybody else can reject you. And don't believe anybody else, because what they say is only truth for them.

I never aspire to be objective because I don't believe in objectivity. It's important to be truthful, and it's important to make sure that the audience has a solid sense of what the expectation should be of a particular film.

I think everybody reacts to entertainment with a different kind of visceral way, probably mostly based on their own personal experiences.