Shelby Foote Quotes

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

The ups and downs are part of what has made you.

Having been through some adversity, starting from different points and having to work through the depth chart on many occasions, it's definitely helped my story.

I think you have to experience life and then pull certain experiences into your act and your character's life, whoever you play, so you're full.

Bad times make good people, as mountainous pressures make diamonds or as fire tempers steel.

People have to go through things in order to become the person they are today, and that's that.

The things we overcome in life really become our strengths.

I've experienced a lot for someone my age that a lot of people will be able to relate to.

I don't know if it's that the scripts are evolving or just that I'm getting older, but the characters become more interesting as you get older because you've lived more life at different stages. You've loved; you've lost; you have more of that journey.

Certainly a decade and a half out in the real world, bashing my head against things, probably made me into a more textured writer. It gives you something to write about.

And if you don't live, you have nothing to write about.

I've had great success and I've had catastrophic failure. It's really how you handle the rough stuff that defines you, I think.

My advice would be not to write until after 35. You need some experience, and for life to knock you about a bit. Growing up is so hard you probably won't have much emotion to spare anyway.

It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.

People that are brilliant and successful, we think they've just always been that way. That's not the case. Most of them have had some tough adversity in their life. It's prepared them. I've never felt like you could develop character without adversity.

There is no education like adversity.

I didn't lead a very wise life, myself, but it was a full one and a grown-up one. You come of age very quickly through shipwreck and disaster.

It feels good when guys reach out to be inspired - and you have shown people an example of how you can come back and be better than you were before when adversity strikes; and when the world predicts the opposite, you show them you not only can be successful but be great.

I told as much of my life as I could to encourage people: to encourage others to get to where they should be, where they want to be.

But at the end of the day, every star, every person that been iconic, has gone through a time in their lives where it was just bad. Everybody. It just made them better.

Possibly because I've lived so much of my life in difficult circumstances, I think I have a more profound understanding of life.

I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction.

At key crossroads in his life, Vernon Davis has continued to make a conscious choice to grow as a person and player. His determination through adversity since his childhood days is commendable.

Everything that I've done has made me who I am today. You know, it's cliche, but it's true.