A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.
—William Styron
Topics: Book, Books, Reading
The madness of depression is the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.
—William Styron
Topics: Depression
Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain … it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.
—William Styron
Topics: Depression
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
—William Styron
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing
I’m simply the happiest, the placidest, when I’m writing, and so I suppose that that, for me, is the final answer. … It’s fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time.
—William Styron
Topics: Authors & Writing
We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
—William Styron
Topics: Awareness, Being Ourselves, Acceptance, Realistic Expectations, Realization, Expectations
The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.
—William Styron
Topics: Suicide
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.
—William Styron
Topics: Authors & Writing
In depression…faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no rememdy will come, not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
—William Styron
Topics: Depression
Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what [a] friend of mine calls “the fleas of life”-you know, colds, hangovers, bills, sprained ankles and little nuisances of one sort or another.
—William Styron
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Philip Roth American Novelist, Short-story Writer
- Saul Bellow Canadian-born American Novelist
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Reynolds Price American Novelist
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Bernard Malamud American Novelist
- William Faulkner American Novelist
- Nelson Algren American Writer
- Toni Morrison American Novelist
- Barbara Kingsolver American Novelist, Essayist
Leave a Reply