I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being deprived of something.
Shelby FooteThe 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.
Shelby FooteI've never known, at least a modern historical instance, where the truth wasn't superior to distortion in every way.
Shelby FootePeople make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.
Shelby Foote