Quote

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.

Shelby Foote

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Shelby Foote
Age: 88 †
Born: 1916
Born: November 17
Died: 2005
Died: June 27
Author
Historian
Novelist
Short Story Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Greenville
Mississippi
Half
Slow
Words
Six
War
Million
Write
Hundred
Reason
Took
Writing
Writer
Years
Millions
Good
Five
Civil

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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.
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I've never shown anybody a draft of anything.
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If you want to study writing, read Dickens
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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.
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Grant was something rare in that or any war. He could learn from experience.
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A fact is not a truth until you love it.
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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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Before the war it was always the United States *are*, after the war it was the United States is... it made us an is.
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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.
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I took five years on the first volume, five years on the second volume, and ten years on the third volume.
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A rich man's war and a poor man's fight.
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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.
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The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.
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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.
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Longevity conquers scandal every time.
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I never cared what kind of grade I got.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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