Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford was a British novelist, prose writer, poet, literary critic, journalist, and publisher who worked in the English language across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Born on 17 December 1873 in London, in what is now the London Borough of Merton, Ford was educated at University College School. His early formation in London placed him within the cultural environment of the United Kingdom, of which he remained a citizen throughout his life.
Ford pursued a notably wide-ranging literary career, producing work across several forms. As a novelist and prose writer, he engaged with fiction extensively, while his activities as a literary critic and journalist extended his reach into commentary and cultural discourse. His role as a publisher further positioned him at the intersection of creative and editorial life, making him an active participant in the literary world beyond his own writing. His work as a poet added yet another dimension to a body of output that crossed generic boundaries consistently.
Ford died on 26 June 1939 in Deauville, France. The breadth of his practice — spanning fiction, verse, criticism, journalism, and publishing — remained the defining characteristic of his engagement with English-language letters.
Quotes by Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford's insights on:
Being correspondent of a Left paper with a name like Eisenstein deprived one of one’s chance of usefulness. Besides.
I am not going to be so American as to say that all true love demands some sacrifice. It doesn’t. But I think that love will be truer and more permanent in which self-sacrifice has been exacted.
Sylvia knew he was only now formulating his settled opinion so as not to have his active brain to give to the discussion.
And Paris, when you avoid the more conspicuous resorts, and when you are unprovided with congenial companionship can prove nearly as overwhelming as is, say, Birmingham on a Sunday.
In every man there are two minds that work side by side, the one checking the other; thus emotion stands against reason, intellect corrects passion and first impressions act a little, but very little, before quick reflection. Yet first impressions have always a bias in their favour, and even quiet reflection has often a job to efface them.
I couldn’t regard myself as personally repulsive. No man can, or, if he ever comes to do so, that is the end of him.
No, by God, it is false! It wasn’t a minuet that we stepped; it was a prison – a prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down so that they might not outsound the rolling of our carriage wheels as we went along the shaded avenues of the Taunus Wald.
