Shelby Foote Quotes

My first novel took 12 years to complete because life got in my way.

Each of my books took roughly one and a half years to write. Some may have taken a shorter time to write the draft and a longer time to revise, while others were the opposite.

I write a book over a period of months or years, and when I'm done with it, usually another year goes by before I see it in print. It's hard to be patient and wait.

'Library of Souls' is longer than 'Hollow City' by a considerable margin, but this time I was on the right track from the beginning, so I never had to start over. It took about 15 months, all told.

It usually takes about a year to write each book. I don't plan it that way. I don't set deadlines. If a book wants to take longer, it can.

I can write a book in probably three months.

Thirteen years I took on this last book.

'Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.

Winning the Pulitzer is wonderful and it's an honor and I feel so humbled and so grateful, but I think that I'll think of it very much as the final sort of final moment for this book and put it behind me along with the rest of the book, as I write more books.

You know that feeling when you finish a final exam and you think, 'I never want to do that again'? Well I have the same feeling when I finish a novel. Each time I say, 'I think I may retire now' and then after six months the ideas start to churn again. I could never stop.

How lucky am I? Quite often I speak at book festivals, and people ask me how I got published. There's people who have been working on a book for as long as ten years, and I feel like such a cow.

I was very fortunate that my first novel captivated the imaginations of so many readers who asked for a sequel. After that, one book led to another as I discovered other facets to my characters I wanted to investigate further.

You fail only if you stop writing.

Usually it takes me about nine to 12 months to write a book.

It took me ten years and seven books to bag an agent - it took me that long to start writing good.

I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.

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.

I love sitting at my desk and facing a quiet day with a pen in my hand, and putting myself into a story. It's kind of weird, isn't it? I mean, to absent myself from real life and make up stories is strange, but I started doing this when I was ten years old. It was all I wanted to do.

Writing a book is such a full-time job. If you're away for a few days, you have to start again.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

It wasn't until I was working on 'Tacky' that I admitted to myself that I was writing a series.

Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I actually accomplished. However, it becomes a motivation to write the next book.

I'm remembering one book that I wrote, 'Fourth Grade Rats,' that took a month to write, but most of them, full-length novels, I would say about a year.

The basic challenge of any book is you know you're going to be working on it for three or four years or more. So you want to have a subject that will keep you engaged.

I like the quiet it takes to pursue an idea the way I pursued 'Hamilton,' but I couldn't write a book, because there's no applause at the end of writing a book.