Shelby Foote Quotes

Well, I'm a slow writer. For me, a good day is a page, maybe a page and a half. I'd love to be more efficient, but I am not.

Some days I'm lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.

At first, I spend about four hours a day writing. Toward the end of a book, I spend up to 16 hours a day on it, because all I want to do is make it good and get it done.

When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks.

I write a thousand words a day.

It takes me ages to write stuff.

Do you know how long it took me to write 'For a Few Dollars More'? Nine days.

In weeks when I was writing a novel, I followed a five-day schedule, doing about thirty pages a day, so a typical Ace novel would take me six or seven days to write.

I write 2,000 words a day when I write. It sometimes takes three hours, it sometimes takes five hours.

I can only write about two or three pages of fiction a day.

I write everywhere. I've written books while I was on planes, at Disney World, and in multiple countries of which I am not a native. It can be a struggle to make word count sometimes, but I will persevere!

Back in my pulp-mag days, I worked from about 8:30 to noon, took an hour off for lunch, and worked again from one to three, for a work day of five and a half hours or so. I wrote 20 to 30 pages of copy in that time, doing it all first draft, so that I was able to produce a short story of 5,000-7,500 words in a single day.

Well, certainly I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

Barton Fink got written very quickly, in about three weeks. I don't know what that means.

I think 'Hollow City' only took a year and a half to write... but it felt like two and a half!

I can write a book in probably three months.

Try to write at least 500 words a day. You may ditch 499 of them tomorrow, but you will still be moving forward.

It is probably true that I would not have had as many children or mothers in my books without being a mother with children. It is definitely true that I would not have written about the Civil War without having a little guy who was obsessed with it.

I only did about one novel a year while I was working full time, but since 1993, I've averaged two and a half books a year.

I don't want to talk too much about the nitty-gritty of writing. It's rather like a pressure cooker with a certain amount of pressure in it - the more you let out, the less you cook.

Inspiration comes from so many sources. Music, other fiction, the non-fiction I read, TV shows, films, news reports, people I know, stories I hear, misheard words or lyrics, dreams... Motivation? The memory of the rush I get from a really good writing session - even on a bad day, I know I'll find that again if I keep going.

I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work.

Can you write 200 words a day? 100? 50? In six months, 50 words a day is 9,000 words. That's 2-3 short stories. If you did 200 words every day, in three months that's 36,000 words. That's half a short novel.

I try to write 1,000 words. Some people say it's not about the quantity but about the quality. I disagree. You need to write a lot in order to figure out what's good and what's crap.

But usually I'll wake up and start writing about nine o'clock. I'll probably write for about three hours, and I'll do that over the next month and a half.