Carolina QuotesThere’s nothing better for a writer than to be reluctant to go to bed, anxious to wake up and start again. That’s living. That’s what I felt.
Shelby Foote Connected to the Carolinas
Source
No citation is recorded for this quotation.
- form
- interview
- work
- Interview for the People Magazine, 1990
- year
- 1990
no citation recorded
Cite this record
“There’s nothing better for a writer than to be reluctant to …” Shelby Foote. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-90C0DD61D7. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/90c0dd61d7
More from Shelby Foote
The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth — not a different truth: the same truth — only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.
I think making mistakes and discovering them for yourself is of great value.
I think what Churchill said about the Civil War was correct: It was the last great romantic war and the first horrendous modern war. It fascinates us because it is still the central event of our history. So many of the questions that still plague us, particularly concerning race relations and the size and power of central government, can be better understood if we see how they arose and how we attempted to solve them.