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I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends.

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.
Friends
Think
Thinking
Unfortunate
Critics

More quotes by William Styron

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Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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The pain of depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.
William Styron
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I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.
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.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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My life and work have been far from free of blemish, and so I think it would be unpardonable for a biographer not to dish up the dirt.
William Styron
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Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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A disruption of the circadian cycle—the metabolic and glandular rhythms that are central to our workaday life—seems to be involved in many, if not most, cases of depression this is why brutal insomnia so often occurs and is most likely why each day’s pattern of distress exhibits fairly predictable alternating periods of intensity and relief.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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Let's face it, writing is hell.
William Styron
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For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.
William Styron