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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.

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.
Writers
Citizens
Second
Quite
Ellis
Class
Pisses
Literature
Nonfiction
Island
Islands

More quotes by William Styron

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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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we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.
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This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
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Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.
William Styron
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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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The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.
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
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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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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.
William Styron
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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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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.
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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A great book should leave you with many experiences.
William Styron
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I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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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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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.
William Styron
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The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
William Styron