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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.

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.
Great
Experiences
Really
Leave
Reading
Lives
Live
Book
Exhausted
Many
Slightly
Mean
Several

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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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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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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 think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.
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Let's face it, writing is hell.
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This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
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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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When, in the autumn of 1947, I was fired from the first and only job I have ever held, I wanted one thing out of life: to become a writer.
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we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.
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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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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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Style comes only have long, hard practice and 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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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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Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
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Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.
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Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
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I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends.
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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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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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