Horton Foote Quotes

Write about what you want to know.

Writing isn't necessarily about what one knows but what one wants to know.

Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man.

Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That's how you focus the world. It's the only reason you should ever try this writing job.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

And I directed my heart to inquire and to search out by wisdom concerning all that is done

The human word is neither immortal nor invulnerable; but it is the power that orders our chaos, and the light by which we live.

Writing is investigation.

Science is a quest for understanding.

Write about what you know, that's what I say.

Oftentimes, I need to write about something in order to understand it.

We're dealing with the chaos of life, and we're rubbing it down. The deeper you rub, the more patterns you can see until you realize that it's really an organized chaos. There isn't really ever any chance to understand it all, but we're here to keep rubbing.

I don't want pictures, I want to find things out.

And, in fact, this is the tale that I would love to write: history is such a romantic place, with its jarveys and urchins and side-buttoned boots. If it would just stay still, I think, and settle down. If it would just stop sliding around in my head.

So much of writing is discovery. Sometimes I feel like a rat in a maze, trying to discover the way out. My little heart is beating, and I'm racing down a path thinking, this is the route, it will get me there, as I turn this way and then that.

The appeal of writing is primarily the investigation of mystery.

The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.

You could know the what of something forever and never discover the why.

I'm nothing. Nothing at all without writing. Without truth, my truth, the only truth I know, it's all a gambol in the pasture without rhythm or sense.

Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.

What's so exciting and terrifying about the writing process is that it really is an act of exploration and discovery. With all of us, not just writers, there is a sort of knowledge of the other. We have a lot more in common than we realize, and I think writing is really a sustained act of empathy.

The writing begins when you’ve finished. Only then do you know what you’re trying to say.