3 Ford Madox Ford Quotes on Writing

Ford Madox Ford quotes on writing

4. No author, I think, is deserving of much censure for vanity if, taking down one of his ten-year-old books, he exclaims: 'Great heavens, did I write as well as that then?' for the implication always is that one does not write any longer so well and few are so envious as to censure the complacencies of an extinct volcano.

7. You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.

16. The first war had ruined him. He had volunteered, though he was over military age and was fighting a country he loved; his health was broken, and he came back to a new literary world which had carefully eliminated him. For some of his later work he could not even find a publisher in England. No wonder he preferred to live abroad - in Provence or New York. But I don't suppose failure disturbed him much: he had never really believed in human happiness, his middle life had been made miserable by passion, and he had come through - with his humour intact, his stock of unreliable anecdotes, the kind of enemies a man ought to have, and a half-belief in a posterity which would care for good writing.