"I think it is absolute and unimpeachable testimony to a book's impact on us that we are able to associate it so keenly with the time and the surroundings and the circumstances in which we read it. Only a very great work can produce this memory; [...] There is what psychologists call a gestalt, an unforgettability of interwoven emotions with which the work will ever in recollection be connected with the environment. Somehow the excitement of reading All the King's Men is always linked in my mind with the howling blizzard outside and the snow piling up in a solid white impacted mass outside my basement window. [...] I finished All the King's Men as in a trance, knowing once and for all that I, too, however falteringly and incompletely, must try to work such magic."
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Section, 'Robert Penn Warren' [part of a speech delivered at the Lotus Club, New York, April 1975] - p.269
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Styron
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William Styron
William Clark Styron, Jr. (11 June 1925 – 1 November 2006) was an American novelist. He is most famous for two controversial novels: the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), depicting the life of Nat Turner, the leader of an 1831 Virginia slave revolt, and Sophie's Choice (1979), which deals with the Holocaust.
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