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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.

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.
Ever
Wanted
Fired
Firsts
Autumn
First
Held
Thing
Profession
Life
Writer
Jobs
Become

More quotes by William Styron

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Let's face it, writing is hell.
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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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Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
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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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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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The weather of Depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.
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Let your love flow out on all living things.
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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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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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The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
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We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
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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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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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we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.
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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.
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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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Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls
William Styron
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A great book should leave you with many experiences.
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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.
William Styron