William Styron Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More William Styron quote about:
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“Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self -- to the mediating intellect-- as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode.”
-- William Styron -
“From the writer's point of view, critics should be ignored, although it's hard not to do what they suggest. I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends. Suppose you write something that stinks, what are they going to say in a review? Say it stinks? So if they're honest, they do, and if you were friends you're still friends, but the knowledge of your lousy writing and their articulate admission of it will be always something between the two of you, like the knowledge between a man and his wife of some shady adultery.”
-- William Styron -
“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
-- William Styron -
“The writer's duty is to keep on writing.”
-- William Styron -
“Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.”
-- William Styron -
“The pain of depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.”
-- William Styron -
“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 -
“The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.”
-- William Styron -
“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 remedy 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 -
“my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.”
-- William Styron -
“The madness of depression is, generally speaking, 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 -
“What this country needs... what this great land of ours needs is something to happen to it. Something ferocious and tragic, like what happened to Jericho or the cities of the plain - something terrible I mean, son, so that when the people have been through hellfire and the crucible, and have suffered agony enough and grief, they’ll be people again, human beings, not a bunch of smug contented cows rooting at the trough.”
-- William Styron -
“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 -
“I thought there's something to be said for honor in this world where there doesn't seem to be any honor left. I thought that maybe happiness wasn't really anything more than the knowledge of a life well spent, in spite of whatever immediate discomfort you had to undergo, and that if a life well spent meant compromises and conciliations and reconciliations, and suffering at the hands of the person you love, well then better that than live without honor.”
-- William Styron -
“In Vineyard Haven, on Martha's Vineyard, mostly I love the soft collision here of harbor and shore, the subtly haunting briny quality that all small towns have when they are situated on the sea”
-- William Styron -
“For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.”
-- William Styron -
“Writing is a fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats... for jittery people.”
-- William Styron -
“The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.”
-- William Styron -
“Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive...”
-- William Styron -
“Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the brink.”
-- William Styron -
“The mornings themselves were becoming bad now as I wandered about lethargic, following my synthetic sleep, but afternoons were still the worst, beginning at about three o'clock, when I'd feel the horror, like some poisonous fog bank roll in upon my mind, forcing me into bed.”
-- William Styron -
“I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends.”
-- William Styron -
“The weather of Depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.”
-- William Styron -
“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.”
-- William Styron -
“I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.”
-- William Styron -
“In Paris on a chilling evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind - a struggle which had engaged me for several months - might have a fatal outcome.”
-- William Styron -
“Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.”
-- William Styron -
“We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.”
-- William Styron -
“I felt myself no longer a husk but a body with some of the body's sweet juices stirring again. I had my first dream in many months, confused but to this day imperishable, with a flute in it somewhere, and a wild goose, and a dancing girl.”
-- William Styron
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