mhsteger: William Styron (born 11 June, 1925;...

Friday June 11, 2010 at 23:59

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mhsteger:

William Styron (born 11 June, 1925; died 1 November, 2006), pictured above in a 1960 photograph in Rome
‘Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word — life. Certainly this might be an age of so-called faithlessness and despair we live in, but the new writers haven’t cornered any market on faithlessness and despair, any more than Dostoyevsky or Marlowe or Sophocles did. Every age has its terrible aches and pains, its peculiar new horrors, and every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what that same friend of mine calls “the fleas of life”—you know, colds, hangovers, bills, sprained ankles, and little nuisances of one sort or another. They are the constants of life, at the core of life, along with nice little delights that come along every now and then.’

—from a 1954 interview with George Plimpton, for The Paris Review

William Styron (born 11 June, 1925; died 1 November, 2006), pictured above in a 1960 photograph in Rome

‘Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word — life. Certainly this might be an age of so-called faithlessness and despair we live in, but the new writers haven’t cornered any market on faithlessness and despair, any more than Dostoyevsky or Marlowe or Sophocles did. Every age has its terrible aches and pains, its peculiar new horrors, and every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what that same friend of mine calls “the fleas of life”—you know, colds, hangovers, bills, sprained ankles, and little nuisances of one sort or another. They are the constants of life, at the core of life, along with nice little delights that come along every now and then.’

—from a 1954 interview with George Plimpton, for The Paris Review

This post was reblogged from varia.