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we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.

William Styron

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William Styron
Age: 81 †
Born: 1925
Born: June 11
Died: 2006
Died: November 1
Military Personnel
Novelist
Writer
Newport News
Virginia
William Clark Styron
Jr.
Mean
Devise
Intolerable
Escape
Means

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The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.
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Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.
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The pain is unrelenting one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
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A great book should leave you with many experiences.
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The writer's duty is to keep on writing.
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For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.
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Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.
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Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
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In Vineyard Haven, on Martha's Vineyard, mostly I love the soft collision here of harbor and shore, the subtly haunting briny quality that all small towns have when they are situated on the sea
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It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time — for jittery people.
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Many of the artifacts of my house had become potential devices for my own destruction: the attic rafters (and an outside maple or two) a means to hang myself, the garage a place to inhale carbon monoxide, the bathtub a vessel to receive the flow from my opened arteries. The kitchen knives in their drawers had but one purpose for me.
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I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends.
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Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.
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I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.
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The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
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A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
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The mornings themselves were becoming bad now as I wandered about lethargic, following my synthetic sleep, but afternoons were still the worst, beginning at about three o'clock, when I'd feel the horror, like some poisonous fog bank roll in upon my mind, forcing me into bed.
William Styron
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Through the healing process of time-and through medical intervention or hospitalization in many cases-most people survive depression which may be its only blessing but to the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer.
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Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the brink.
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I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.
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