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I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.

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.
Thinking
Confrontation
Compelling
Crafts
Theme
Fiction
Evil
Good
Think
Themes

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Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can't quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.
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my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.
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It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
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we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.
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Most books, like their authors, are born to die of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them they live, and their influence lives forever.
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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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Let's face it, writing is hell.
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Let your love flow out on all living things.
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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.
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I have learned to cry again and I think perhaps that means I am a human being again. Perhaps that at least. A piece of human being but, yes, a human being.
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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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In Paris on a chilling evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind - a struggle which had engaged me for several months - might have a fatal outcome.
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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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Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.
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In depression . . . faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come - - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute . . . It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
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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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Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.
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