William Styron
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"William Clark Styron, Jr." was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work.

For much of his career, Styron was best known for his novels, including:

* Lie Down in Darkness (novel)/Lie Down in Darkness (1951), his acclaimed first novel, published at age 26;

* The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)/The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), narrated by Nat Turner, the leader of an 1831 Virginian slavery/slave revolt;

* Sophie's Choice (novel)/Sophie's Choice (1979), a story "told through the eyes of a young aspiring writer from the South, about a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp/Auschwitz and her brilliant but troubled Jewish lover in postwar Brooklyn".

In 1985, he suffered his most serious bout with depression (mood)/depression. Out of this grave and menacing experience, he was later able to write the memoir Darkness Visible (Styron)/Darkness Visible (1990), the work Styron became best known for during the last two decades of his life.

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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.

The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

The madness of depression is the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.

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.

Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

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.

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.

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.