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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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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.
Dishes
Dirt
Free
Work
Biographer
Would
Blemish
Think
Unpardonable
Thinking
Biographers
Life
Dish

More quotes by William Styron

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The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.
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Let your love flow out on all living things.
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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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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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We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
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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.
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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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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Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.
William Styron
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The writer's duty is to keep on writing.
William Styron
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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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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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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.
William Styron
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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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A great book should leave you with many experiences.
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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It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
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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The mornings themselves were becoming bad now as I wandered about lethargic, following my synthetic sleep, but afternoons were still the worst, beginning at about three o'clock, when I'd feel the horror, like some poisonous fog bank roll in upon my mind, forcing me into bed.
William Styron