William Styron Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• Many of the artifacts of my house had become potential devices for my own destruction: the attic rafters (and an outside maple or two) a means to hang myself, the garage a place to inhale carbon monoxide, the bathtub a vessel to receive the flow from my opened arteries. The kitchen knives in their drawers had but one purpose for me.

  William Styron

  Mean, Knives, Two

  William Styron (2010). “Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness”, p.27, Open Road Media

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• Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.

  William Styron

  Writing, Practice, Long

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• Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.

  William Styron

  Painful, Elusive

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• Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.

  William Styron

  Satire

  William Styron (2015). “My Generation: Collected Nonfiction”, p.609, Random House

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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

  Writing, People, Scared

  "Conversations with 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

  Thinking, Would Be, Dirt

  "A Conversation with William Styron". Interview with Sheldon Hackney, www.neh.gov. May/June 1997.

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• I discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. Certainly I have written enough of it to demonstrate that I harbor no disdain for literary journalism or just plain journalism, under whose sponsorship I have been able to express much that has fascinated me, or alarmed me, or amused me, or otherwise engaged my attention when I was not writing a book.

  William Styron

  Book, Writing, Past

  William Styron (1993). “This Quiet Dust and Other Writings”, Vintage

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• I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends.

  William Styron

  Friends, Thinking, Critics

  William Styron, James L. W. West (1985). “Conversations with William Styron”, p.15, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation-who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him-but he must go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope-qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for, and are not commonly come by with much ease, either by a critic's formula or by a critic's yearning.

  William Styron

  Writing, Past, Judging

  William Styron (2015). “My Generation: Collected Nonfiction”, p.417, Random House

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• I felt a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility - as if my body had actually become frail, hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy, lacking normal coordination. And soon I was in the throes of a pervasive hypochondria.

  William Styron

  Numbness, Body, Normal

  William Styron (1990). “Darkness visible: a memoir of madness”, Random House Incorporated

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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

  Islands, Class, Citizens

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• I think that the best of my generation...have reversed the customary rules of the game and have grown more radical as they have gotten older - a disconcerting but healthy sign. To be sure, there are many youngish old fogies around and even the most illustrious of these, William Buckley, is blessed by a puzzling, recondite but undeniable charm, almost as if beneath that patrician exterior an egalitarian was signaling to get out.

  William Styron

  Blessed, Thinking, Games

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