Horton Foote Quotes

Once you start writing something obsessively, it's almost like someone has to rip it from your hands in order for you to put it down.

My identity is based around being a writer. I can't not write. It's a compulsion.

Sometimes people ask, 'If you'd never had a reader, would you carry on writing?' No.

To me the question is always this: if a ray of light came out of the sky and said, "Your next book will never be published - would you still write it?" If the answer is yes, the book is worth writing.

I love to act. I need to act. It's the big itch I need to scratch.

I don't even know at what age I started, because it's always been there. Performing... creating... it's in my DNA.

I can't envisage stopping writing.

If you cut a painter's hands off, he'd still feel the urge to pick up a brush.

I'm like a junkie for writing.

I've been writing my entire life, and I'll always write.

Even if nobody cared, I'm still gonna make music.

If you're a musician and an artist, you don't just stop.

Other filmmakers make their movies and put them out and that's that. For me, for some odd reason, it goes deeper than that.

I also believe that if you're really a writer, you'll write, and that nobody could stop you.

Do not think that I have stopped painting, for at any moment, I am liable to paint a good picture.

I'm the kind of person who lives my art. It's not that I want to necessarily do it: it's that I have to. It's always been that way. That's how I write songs, and it's always been this way.

I think I write and publish as often as I do because I can't bear being without a book to work on... I don't feel I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell, but I know I want to be occupied with the writing process while I'm living.

Even if nobody was listening to it, I'd still be making music.

People who are artists professionally are not artists because they want to be artists; they have to be artists. They're compelled to get that creativity out and to share that with others.

I'm always writing. There's no stopping. It's just that you can't see it sometimes.

If you love music and it requires hours of practice that can be boring, you can survive the boredom, you're not going to love it but you can survive the boredom because you're connected to something that excites you.

I have never, God or whatever knows, prostrated myself to be famous, but I would meander through all the sewers of the world, through all degradations and humiliations, in order to paint. I have to do this. Until the last drop every vision that exists in my being must be purged; then it will be a pleasure for me to be rid of this damned torture

Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write [create]? Dig into yourself for a deep answer.

If you're not an actor, or if you're any other kind of artist, there's this sense that, "I must express this thing." Why make a painting if you don't feel like you have to for something inside of yourself? Why make a song if you don't feel like you have to because there's something that you need to get out? And when you're an actor and you're not performing text that you've written, I think there's this bizarre disconnect with the must-ness of it.

There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed.