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

More quotes by William Styron

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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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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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I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.
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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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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.
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A great book should leave you with many experiences.
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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.
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The writer's duty is to keep on writing.
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Let's face it, writing is hell.
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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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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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It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
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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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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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This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
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Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self -- to the mediating intellect-- as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode.
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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 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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Let your love flow out on all living things.
William Styron
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I'm simply the happiest, the placidest, when I'm writing, and so I suppose that that, for me, is the final answer. ... It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time.
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