Shelby Foote quotes

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. (Shelby Foote)
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. View quote
Shelby Foote
My second book, Follow Me Down had some success, got good critical notices, went into a second printing and things like that, but Shiloh was by far the most successful of those first five novels. View quote
Shelby Foote
Shiloh is a wonderfully dramatic battle. The leader of one side is killed, and the other one is going on to glory, and it was the first great battle. It lasted two days. View quote
Shelby Foote
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. View quote
Shelby Foote
A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library. The library is the university. View quote
Shelby Foote
The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth - not a different truth: the same truth - only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them. View quote
Shelby Foote
I'm crazy about Grant: his character, his nature, his science in fighting and everything else. But I don't like the idea that he never accepted the blame for anything, always found someone else to blame for any mistake that was ever made, including blaming Prentiss for Shiloh. View quote
Shelby Foote
Longevity conquers scandal every time. View quote
Shelby Foote
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. View quote
Shelby Foote
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. (Shelby Foote)
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. View quote
Shelby Foote
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. View quote
Shelby Foote
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. View quote
Shelby Foote
I never cared what kind of grade I got. View quote
Shelby Foote
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. View quote
Shelby Foote
I don't want anything to do with anything mechanical between me and the paper, including a typewriter, and I don't even want a fountain pen between me and the paper. View quote
Shelby Foote
I took five years on the first volume, five years on the second volume, and ten years on the third volume. View quote
Shelby Foote
If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing. View quote
Shelby Foote
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. View quote
Shelby Foote
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. (Shelby Foote)
Most of my inspiration, if that's the word, came from books themselves. View quote
Shelby Foote
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. View quote
Shelby Foote
I've never shown anybody a draft of anything. View quote
Shelby Foote
Before the war, it was said 'the United States are' - grammatically it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war it was always 'the United States is', as we say today without being self-conscious at all. And that sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an 'is'. View quote
Shelby Foote