Ford Madox Ford Quotes.
Pride and reserve are not the only things in life; perhaps they are not even the best things. But if they happen to be your particular virtues you will go all to pieces if you let them go.
Yes, a war is inevitable. Firstly, there’s you fellows who can’t be trusted. And then there’s the multitude who mean to have bathrooms and white enamel. Millions of them; all over the world. Not merely here. And there aren’t enough bathrooms and white enamel in the world to go round.
The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story – and then your story!
If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn’t it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?
I know nothing – nothing in the world – of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone – horribly alone.
The war had made a man of him! It had coarsened him and hardened him. There was no other way to look at it. It had made him reach a point at which he would no longer stand unbearable things.
What the artist wishes to do — as far as you are concerned — is to take you out of yourself. As far as he is concerned, he wishes to express himself.
It is not merely that people must die and people must suffer, if not here, then there. But what is dreadful is that the world goes on and people go on being stupidly cruel – in the old ways and all the time.
[W]e are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other.
The world is full of places to which I want to return
We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.
The instances of honesty that one comes across in this world are just as amazing as the instances of dishonesty. After forty-five years of mixing with one’s kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of being able to know something about one’s fellow beings. But one doesn’t
Why can’t people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.
The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists – even of the fact he is reading a book.
It was an odd friendship, but the oddnesses of friendships are a frequent guarantee of their lasting texture.
But responsibility hardens the heart. It must.
Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.
New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible – because it is large enough to be incurious.
Higher than the beasts, lower than the angels, stuck in our idiot Eden.
