Horton Foote Quotes

I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really.

I'm not one of those authors who claims to hear voices in my head or 'let the characters speak through me,' whatever that might mean.

In my early writing, all of my characters were exactly the same person. They all spoke the same, made the same types of jokes, reacted the same, etc. I think they were all just me in disguise.

Write the best book you can, the one that demands to be written, no matter what genre it is. Even a trend the trades tell you has gone stale can be revitalized by a superb piece of writing. It'll never be revitalized by someone jumping on a trend bandwagon.

Ignore all advice about writing. Leave your blood on every page. Every page!

All writers are mimics, and I'm not interested in picking up somebody else's style or voice.

As a writer, you have to first of all write what you want to. Listen to advice, by all means, but don't get bogged down in it.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

I tried writing adult romances, but it just didn't fit my voice.

I'm a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

A writer doesn't write about just anything. He writes about things he has an affinity for.

Writing for 'Rooster' was a strange experience. It's funny, once you tap into a voice, words just start to flow. You know when you've hit a spirit or captured something.

I know that the writers I read and admire all have an influence on my work, but trying to determine to what degree any particular piece of input changes the way I think about writing seems counterproductive.

People love talking about writers as storytellers, but I hate being called that: it suggests I got it from my grandmother or something, when my writing really comes out of silence. If a storyteller came up to me, I'd run away.

I always wanted to be a writer. In the beginning, I thought I had to rewrite 'Gone with the Wind,' but eventually, I found my way and realized that wasn't me.

I know that when I'm writing, I always want to be directing.

It's so difficult to be conscious of a development of a style. You find yourself writing in a certain style, and the analysis of how you came to it can only ever be applied retroactively. You're never conscious of why you're producing it.

I wish I could think of a suitable name for the kind of writing I do.

I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, "Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry."

I write my books never thinking of an actor.

I don't really think of myself so much as a writer as a stylist, someone who came into writing from the back door and has found it through a certain very specific and personal means.

I only want to write. I don't care about directing, really. I've tried it, and it was fun, but it's not like I have to.

I need a consistency of my moods if there is to be any consistency in my style. I can't attempt to write always in the hollow flux of desperation and incipient terror.

It is true that it is usually for their books that novelists reserve their most considered and ordered thoughts, but the fact is they arise inescapably from one consciousness: the same one that is occupied in all the other activities which make up a life.