Art & Creativity Quote by Shelby Foote

Foote’s little hedge - "if that's the word" - is doing the heavy lifting. Inspiration is the romantic term, the candlelit-muse story readers like to hear. Foote, a novelist-turned-legendary Civil War narrator, distrusts that myth. He’s signaling a craft ethic: his fuel wasn’t lightning bolts of feeling so much as the accumulated pressure of other sentences, other structures, other voices. Books didn’t just inspire him; they trained his ear and disciplined his ambition.

The line also carries a quiet confession about lineage. Foote wrote in an era when American literary masculinity often prized the self-made genius. By crediting books themselves, he admits dependence, even apprenticeship. It’s modest on the surface, but it’s also a claim of seriousness: he’s placing himself inside a tradition where style is learned through immersion and where history is not merely researched but read into being.

Context matters: Foote’s fame rests on narrative history that reads like a novel, and his method was famously old-school - long hours, deep reading, and a resistance to academic machinery. "Books themselves" suggests a closed circuit of influence: not the spectacle of events, not the author’s personal drama, but the textual world as the primary reality. The subtext is almost polemical: if you want to write, stop hunting for inspiration in the lifestyle and go live inside literature. It’s a rebuke to the cult of originality and a reminder that writers are, first, readers with a long memory.