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INTERVIEWER
Do you think—as some people have been saying—that the young writer today works at a greater disadvantage than those of preceding generations?
STYRON
Hell no, I don’t. 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.
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| Related Links |
- An Indulgence of Authors' Self-Portraits, Issue No. 67
- Family Album, Issue No. 106
- from The Confessions of Nat Turner, Issue No. 36
- Glimpses: James Jones, Issue No. 103
- Glimpses: James Jones, Issue No. 103
- Letter to an Editor, Issue No. 1
- Saipan: July 1945, Issue No. 103
- The Art of Fiction No. 156, Issue No. 150
- The McCabes, Issue No. 22
- Three Minutes or Less, Issue No. 153
- Transcontinental with Tex, Issue No. 138
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| Authors Mentioned |
| Hortense Calisher, Anton Chekhov, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, E. M. Forster, Ernest Hemingway, Victor Hugo, Leonid Andreiev, William Blake, George Washington Cable, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gustave Flaubert, Nikolai Gogol, Maxim Gorky, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, James Joyce, Christopher Marlowe, W. Somerset Maugham, Guy de Maupassant, Carson McCullers, Alfred de Musset, Thomas Nelson Page, J. D. Salinger, William Shakespeare, Sophocles, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Mark Twain |
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