Horton Foote Quotes

#1. I so earnestly believe that prayer can be helpful and guide you and protect you and inspire you. I mean, I'm in awe.

Horton Foote

#2. If I ever teach writing again, I'd say the first lesson is to listen.

Horton Foote

#3. I've known people that the world has thrown everything at to discourage them ... to break their spirit. And yet something about them retains a dignity. They face life and don't ask quarters.

Horton Foote

#4. I don't think I'll ever stop writing. I write almost every day. I'd write plays even if they were never done again. You're at the mercy of whatever talent you have.

Horton Foote

#5. But I don't really write to honor the past. I write to investigate, to try to figure out what happened and why it happened, knowing I'll never really know. I think all the writers that I admire have this same desire, the desire to bring order out of chaos.

Horton Foote

#6. A writer has an inescapable voice. I think it's inherent in the nature, and I think that we don't control it anymore than we control what we want to write about.

Horton Foote

#7. I'm a social writer in the sense that I want to record, but not in the sense of trying to change people's minds.

Horton Foote

#8. Early on, I said to myself that I would like to write a kind of moral and spiritual history of a place. It sounds a little pretentious, I know. But that's really what I set for myself.

Horton Foote

#9. You have to watch out with my plays. They're like yeast. You think they're one thing, then all of a sudden subtext gets to working.

Horton Foote

#10. My mother, twenty-two, was Harriet Gautier Brooks, named for her paternal grandmother, but always called Hallie. My father, twenty-six, was Albert Horton Foote, named for his father and great-grandfather, and I was named Albert Horton Foote, Jr.

Horton Foote

#11. A lot of writing is thinking.

Horton Foote

#12. When you're a writer, you have to write these stories, even if you don't get paid

Horton Foote

#13. I come out of a strong oral tradition in the South,

Horton Foote

#14. In New York, there are a lot of plays to see, and I try to see as many as I can.

Horton Foote

#15. I've redone plays of mine and made changes. A play is a living thing, and I'd never say I wouldn't rewrite years later. Tennessee Williams did that all the time, and it's distressing, because I'd like the play to be out there in its finished form.

Horton Foote

#16. My first memory was of stories about the past - a past that, according to the storytellers, was superior in every way to the life then being lived. It didn't take me long, however, to understand that the present was all we had, for the past was gone, and nothing could be done about it.

Horton Foote

#17. I've lived long enough to know things go in and out of fashion, and things not well received now can be totally reversed years later.

Horton Foote

#18. Writing is the thing that props me up.

Horton Foote