Shelby Foote Quotes

I would never lie to anyone about history.

Lies are beginning to be solidified and made into historical fact…. The truth is all I want for history.

Historical truth and the marketing needs of the movie and television industry remain fundamentally incompatible.

Truth is quite constricting, in a way. You endlessly see at the start of a film 'This is a true story'.

I wanted to be as authentic as possible because, first of all, Jean Shrimpton is still alive. And, she's interesting enough to be played accurately. I didn't need to add things.

Exactitude is not truth.

I'm not big into images. I'm into reality.

My books are based 98 percent on documentary evidence.

The problem is when you are writing something in retrospective, it needs a lot of courage not to change, or you will forget a certain reality, and you will just take in consideration your view today.

Setting is the bedrock of your story. If you choose a real-world backdrop, be certain you get your facts straight.

Of course history is easily manipulated - though that makes it even more important for us to know what actually happened.

I'm very, very leery of nonfiction books where they change timeframes and use - what do they call those things? - composite characters. I don't think that's right.

First and foremost, telling historical stories is very tricky because it is something that is known. It is not like you can tell a lie or change something that is written in black and white.

Every historian with professional standards speaks or writes what he believes to be true.

I don't like docudramas. Documentaries should not go together with fiction, or half-fiction or quarter-fiction. The two should not go together. They cannot mix.

I always like when things are loosely based on real events. That always makes it more interesting because there's a lot of research you can do.

It is taboo for us to criticize religion… but we have no such prohibition regarding history or geography…. If some one tells us that Tennessee is on the West Coast of the United States we are under no obligation to respect his view.

The true historian … reveres the fact rather than any theory.

There is, admittedly, a trend in popular history toward long books that bombard the reader with a fusillade of detail in the mistaken belief that accuracy is proportional to volume.

People are not likely to lie on the Internet about the atomic number of Rubidium, but they will lie about history.

There’s dramatic license, which is necessary or nothing’s fun, and historical truth, which is necessary or nothing’s understood.

Serious biographies need to have a historical base in facts.

I am no historian but have tried to stick tight to the facts.

Objectivity is the purpose of documentary filmmakers.

The primary goal of the so-called nonfiction text is to relay the facts of an event - the facts about a person, the facts of history - which is not why I turned to this genre.