Carolina QuotesA great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
William Styron Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Interview in Writers at Work, First Series (1958), edited by George Plimpton
- form
- interview
- year
- 1958
Cite this record
“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and sli…” William Styron. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-53EDC1F5F7. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/53edc1f5f7
More from William Styron
“Surely mankind has yet to be born. Surely this is true! For only something blind and uncomprehending could exist in such a mean conjunction with its own flesh, its own kind. How else account for such faltering, clumsy, hateful cruelty? Even the possums and the skunks know better! Even the weasels and the meadow mice have a natural regard for their own blood and kin. Only the insects are low enough to do the low things that people do — like those ants that swarm on poplars in the summertime, greedily husbanding little green aphids for the honeydew they secrete. Yes, it could be that mankind has yet to be born. Ah, what bitter tears God must weep at the sight of the things that men do to other men!” He broke off then and I saw him shake his head convulsively, his voice a sudden cry: “In the name of money! Money! ”
The Consumers Union Report on Smoking was an aid to my stopping a two-pack-a-day habit which commenced in early infancy. For myself, after two or three days of great flaccidity of spirit, an aimless oral yearning, aching moments of hunger at the pit of the stomach, and an awful intermittent urge to burst into tears, the problem resolved itself, and in less than a week all craving vanished. Curiously, for the first time in my life, I developed a racking cough, but this, too, disappeared. A sense of smugness, a kind of fatness of soul, is the reward for such a struggle.
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.