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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.

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.
Well
Feeling
Writing
Pleasure
Much
Face
Negated
Getting
Warm
Faces
Fine
Pain
Started
Feelings
Hell
Wells
Pretty

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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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In the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do-by the skin of our teeth.
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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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The writer's duty is to keep on writing.
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Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.
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I felt a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility - as if my body had actually become frail, hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy, lacking normal coordination. And soon I was in the throes of a pervasive hypochondria.
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Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.
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Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.
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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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The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
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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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I felt myself no longer a husk but a body with some of the body's sweet juices stirring again. I had my first dream in many months, confused but to this day imperishable, with a flute in it somewhere, and a wild goose, and a dancing girl.
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Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
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What I really mean is that a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
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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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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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Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.
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I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.
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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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