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"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."
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"Success is subjective. Your dream bank balance could be someone else's nightmare."

"You know you made it, when people you know, tell people they know, that you know them."

"Sometimes the difference between success and failure is simply the degree to which you crave one over the other."

"As a character I am dead, as a writer I am not."

"You don't need notes... you either do it ... or you either you don't do it."

"This age is interested in success, not suffering . . . Our Lord was ridiculed, insulted, persecuted, and eventually killed. In the face of opposition, He went about “doing good."

"Feeling is the consciousness of the resulting conditions - of success, failure, equilibrium, compromise or balance, in this continuous rivalry of ideas."
Explore more quotes by 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."


"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."


"I took five years on the first volume, five years on the second volume, and ten years on the third volume."


"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."


"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."


"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."


"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."


"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 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."
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