Success Quote by Shelby Foote

Foote is smuggling a hard-edged democratic idea about experience into what sounds like gentle encouragement: a writer doesn’t get to curate life into only the useful parts. The line works because it rejects the precious myth of “inspiration” and replaces it with something closer to apprenticeship. Everything counts, not because everything is interesting, but because the writer’s job is to metabolize it into meaning.

The pairing of adversity and success is the quote’s quiet provocation. Most writing advice romanticizes suffering; Foote refuses that melodrama and insists on the full spectrum. Success teaches its own distortions: vanity, compromise, the strange pressure to repeat yourself, the way praise can flatten risk. Adversity, meanwhile, trains attention and endurance, but it can also tempt you toward grievance-as-style. Foote’s subtext is that neither is morally superior; both are raw material, and both can be misused. What matters is contact with consequence.

Context matters here: Foote, a novelist turned celebrated Civil War historian, was steeped in a tradition where character is forged through collision with events larger than oneself. His phrasing echoes the historian’s sensibility: you are “made” by forces, and deprivation isn’t just lack but a missed education. There’s also a stern generosity in the final sentence. He’s not shaming the sheltered; he’s warning that insulation is its own poverty. For Foote, to be “deprived” of hardship or triumph is to be kept from the friction that turns observation into voice.