A Quote by 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

Quote Topics

Adversity Being Both Contribute Deprived Either Everything Experience Helps Largely Making Something Success Think Those Write Writer

Quote Author

Shelby Foote
American - Novelist
November 17, 1916 - June 27, 2005

I think my experience as an actor helps me to write anything. It certainly helped me to write 'August Osage County.' It helps me to write any play that I'm working on because I think one of the things I do well is write good roles for actors.

Tracy Letts

The most difficult thing about living as a writer is precisely 'having to write.' Pretending to be a writer is easy. Living freely, reading many books, going on frequent trips, cultivating minor eccentricities... but genuinely being a writer is difficult, because you have to write something that will convince both yourself and readers.

Kim Young-ha

When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years ? whether it is being the writer or being the lover ? turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.

Philip Roth

Any negative review you write, they'll say, "Oh, you're being so mean." I think the problem with a lot of criticism is that too many critics either write just description or they write in a Mandarin jargon that only a handful of people can understand, or they write happy criticis - everything is good that they write about. I think that's really not good. I think it's damaged a lot of our critical voices.

Jerry Saltz

The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve…something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness — those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.

Joy Williams

I think our culture views success as visibility, being seen as being successful. Whereas I've learned that success is rooted in helping and connecting to other people, and knowing where you can contribute. I've kind of spent my thirties doing that, because in my twenties I was seeking any kind of success.

Mike Birbiglia

I'm trying to learn something about making a balance between the inner life and the outer life. I wouldn't write if I didn't need to be making those discoveries, if I didn't feel the perpetual ignorance of being a human being.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

As a reader, when the writer gets sentimental, you drift, because there's something fishy going on there. You recognize a moment that's largely about the writer and the writer's own need to believe in something that might not in fact exist. As a reader, you think, 'Where did the story go? Where did the person I'm reading about go?'

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you're deprived of it.

Wole Soyinka

I think persistence in the face of adversity is an essential part of a writer’s job description. If you don’t care enough about it to avoid being easily disheartened that way, you really should be doing something else.

Lawrence Block

I want to be able to experience everything. I want to experience being a husband, experience being a father, experience, maybe, hopefully, someday being a grandfather, and all those things. I want that experience. When I die, I want to be exhausted.

Bryan Cranston

I try to think of it not as writer's block, but a time where you just need to live life and experience things so you have something to write about.

Kaui Hart Hemmings

If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and write. If you stop, start again. Save everything that you write. If you feel blocked, write through it until you feel your creative juices flowing again. Write. Writing is what makes a writer, nothing more and nothing less.

Anne Rice

The key to your success, to my success, to everyone's success is determined by our daily agenda. What you and I do every day is either making us or breaking us, we're either preparing or repairing. So when somebody says, 'John, I want to be a success. Where do I start?' I say, It's very simple. Start with today.

John C. Maxwell

I think of myself as someone who thinks largely through writing. Thus I write more than most people, and I write in many different forms. I think of myself as the kind of person who writes, rather than as one kind of writer or another.