Writing is Hell?'Interviewer: Do you enjoy writing?
William Styron: 'I certainly don't. 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.'
--From a Paris Review interview with the late Styron, originally published in 1954. Of course, it didn't help that he developed a terrible case of depression, perhaps latent even at that early date. Out of that experience, however, came his powerful book, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. Many--myself included--consider it possibly the best, bravest and most eloquent book ever written about the subject of depression.
2 Comments:
A friend of mine from New York let me borrow that book earlier this year. I read it in a day and agree, it is a very powerful little book.
And a very powerful endorsement that you read it in a single day. Great books have a way of making you do that. Anyway, happy to hear from you Miles, as always. And please do drop me an email at my new address listed above, because yours is one of a handful of email addresses that didn't seem to make it into my new system when I imported the old address book into the Google mail system. My apologies.
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