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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

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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.
Person
Burning
Writing
Ambition
Years
Whose
Like
Beyond
College
Year
Sophomore
Write
Sole
Persons
Useless

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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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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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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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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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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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The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
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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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Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
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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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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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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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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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Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.
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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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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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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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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.
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The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.
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