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Shelby Foote
Novelist and Historian
I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of -- I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry. I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose. But I haven't known a single writer who didn't start out trying to write poetry. William Faulkner always called himself a failed poet.
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Shelby Foote
Novelist and Historian
If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing. Now, there are good writers who do not feel that way about it. Flannery O'Connor for instance. She went to writing classes and learned a great deal from them. You can't really make rules about writers any more than -- they're as different as -- you can't talk about chairs. There are so many different kinds of chairs, and there are as many different kinds of writers as there are chairs.
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Shelby Foote
Novelist and Historian
I was never a trained historian, three by five cards and all that business. So that I would remember - -I would be writing about something like the third day at Gettysburg, and it was something I couldn't remember the exact quote of, and I of course wanted to look it up and get it accurate, but I couldn't remember except that it was in a book with a red binding, and it was on the left-hand side on the top third of the page. So I would go to the shelf and pull down every red-bound book and look through it, and I would come across things like -- I'd say, "My God, I never noticed that before," and it had nothing to do with Gettysburg or anything else, but it would go into the book later in some other way.
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Milton Friedman
Nobel Prize in Economics
Outside of my parents and my wife, there is nobody else who had as much influence on my life as Arthur Burns did. And as I say, that major source of influence started exerting itself during a course I took in which there were only two students and he. And this course consisted -- I don't know what it was supposed to be -- but it consisted in going over the draft of his doctoral dissertation sentence by sentence, and trying to find mistakes in it, and analyze it and improve it and criticize it. And as I say, I can think of but one other course in my life that had as much value to me as that course. Because it supplied standards of workmanship, the level of accuracy you want to aim at, the openness to criticism. Those are the kinds of things it provided.
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Carlos Fuentes
Author, Scholar & Diplomat
I wanted to be a writer always. I had published my first stories in Chile when I was 11 years old, and went on from there and won contests in high school. Well, that was my vocation, no doubt about it. So when I was told, "Now you have to do law school," I said, "Why? I want to be a writer; I don't want to be a lawyer." But the pressure in Mexico at the time was if you are a writer, you will die of hunger, so you must have a professional title. I remember visiting the great Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes, who my father told, "Convince Carlos he has to be a lawyer." And he said -- and Alfonso was the greatest Mexican writer at the time -- and he said, "I am a writer, but first I am a lawyer, because Mexico is a formalistic country. We are all hot cups of coffee, and if you don't have the handle to pick us up, people will burn their hands. You have to be Doctor something, Licenciado something, Engineer something or other." So I obeyed him and I went to school in Mexico. I went to school in Geneva. I achieved a broadness of education I would not have had otherwise. By reading law -- going back to read philosophy, Roman law, the medieval times, which are so important to understand Latin America, the philosophy of the Middle Ages -- I got a whole picture of the world that I would not have had if I had not studied law. So I'm very grateful for it.
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Carlos Fuentes
Author, Scholar & Diplomat
You have to love reading in order to be a good writer. Because writing doesn't start with you. It doesn't spring from nothing. It doesn't start at zero. You have to be conscious that there is a tremendous tradition behind you, a tradition that goes way back to the Bible and Homer and whatever you wish -- and Aztec myths. You have to see yourself as part of the chain of being, if you wish. You are part of a process of language and memory and imagination. To put it in a nutshell, I think that to create, you have to be conscious of tradition. But to keep the tradition alive, you have to create something new. That would be my formula.
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