Shelby Foote Quotes
-
I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being deprived of something.
→ -
North was only a direction indicated by a compass--if a man had one, that is, for otherwise there was no north or south or east or west; there was only the brooding desolation.
→ -
I prize the Depression, for instance, because I learned the value of things in the Depression that a way people who don't have to worry about such things never learned to prize it really, I believe.
→ -
If you want to study writing, read Dickens
→ -
Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time.
→ -
I've never known, at least a modern historical instance, where the truth wasn't superior to distortion in every way.
→ -
Getting close to books, and spending time by myself, I was obliged to think about things I would never have thought about if I was busy romping around with a brother and sister.
→ -
I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.
→ -
I took five years on the first volume, five years on the second volume, and ten years on the third volume.
→ -
And I really do think that the difficulty of research makes it more real to you than punching a thing to find out how many men were killed at this particular action.
→ -
People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.
→ -
People want to know why the South is so interested in the Civil War. I had maybe, it's a rough guess, about fifty fistfights in my life. Out of those fifty fistfights, the ones that I had the most vivid memory of were the ones I lost. I think that's one reason why the South remembers the war more than the North does.
→ -
A rich man's war and a poor man's fight.
→ -
I think making mistakes and discovering them for yourself is of great value, but to have someone else to point out your mistakes is a shortcut of the process.
→ -
Before the war it was always the United States *are*, after the war it was the United States is... it made us an is.
→ -
Generally the first week in September brings the hottest weather of the year, and this was no exception. Overhead the fans turned slow, their paddle blades stirring the air up close to the ceiling but nowheres else.
→ -
As a Southerner I would have to say that one of the main importances of the War is that Southerners have a sense of defeat which none of the rest of the country has.
→ -
I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.
→ -
But the same thing was true in the army. You slept in a barracks with all kinds of people of every nationality, every trade, every character and quality you can imagine, and that was a good experience.
→ -
When you grow up in a totally segregated society, where everybody around you believes that segregation is proper, you have a hard time. You can't believe how much it's a part of your thinking.
→ -
I've never shown anybody a draft of anything.
→ -
And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.
→ -
Longevity conquers scandal every time.
→ -
I abhor the idea of a perfect world. It would bore me to tears.
→ -
A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.
→ -
Grant was something rare in that or any war. He could learn from experience.
→ -
A combination of all that was best in the gladdest days of the departing year.
→ -
Of all the passions of mankind, the love of novelty most rules the mind. In search of this, from realm to realm we roam. Our fleets come loaded with every folly home.
→ -
A fact is not a truth until you love it.
→ -
I never cared what kind of grade I got.
→
Related Authors
-
William Tecumseh Sherman U.S. General -
-
William Faulkner Writer -
Stonewall Jackson Military Commander -
Jefferson Davis Former President of the Confederate States of America -
-
Charles Dickens Writer -
Tony Horwitz Journalist -
George B. McClellan Former Governor of New Jersey -
Anton Chekhov Physician -
Ken Burns Producer -
Anna Akhmatova Poet -
Ed Bearss Historian -
David McCullough Author -
Bruce Catton Historian -
Marcel Proust Novelist -
Robert E. Lee Military Officer -
Walker Percy Author -
Jeff Shaara Novelist -
Horton Foote Playwright