Horton Foote quotes:

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.

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

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.

I often write about nonreligious people, and I try to find situations where their sense of humanity is restored or discovered. I think you can be a good person in many ways. And I think you often have to be careful that prayer can seem superficial, because it's a very complicated thing to love your neighbor as yourself.

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.

I have enormous respect for the human being because they're asked to take on a lot. And I don't think there's any easy solution. But I think the journey is what you have to finally be satisfied with, but not be afraid of the lessons one has to learn... it ends up as grace. And you grow; you find a way to continue.

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.

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.

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

Writing is the thing that props me up.

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

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.

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.

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

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.