William Styron Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical 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
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

William Styron
I was at that age when reading was still a passion and thus, save for a happy marriage, the best state possible in which to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

William Styron
In the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do-by the skin of our teeth.

William Styron
A disruption of the circadian cycle—the metabolic and glandular rhythms that are central to our workaday life—seems to be involved in many, if not most, cases of depression; this is why brutal insomnia so often occurs and is most likely why each day's pattern of distress exhibits fairly predictable alternating periods of intensity and relief.

William Styron
For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.

William Styron
Grieving, yet somehow unbending, steadfast, unafraid, the voice rose through the evening like memory, and a gust of wind blew up from the river, dimming the song, rustling the trees, then died and became still. I'll lay in de grave and stretch out my arms … Suddenly the voice ceased, and all was quiet.
Then what I done was wrong, Lord? I said. And if what I done was wrong, is there no redemption?
I raised my eyes upward but there was no answer, only the gray impermeable sky and night falling fast over Jerusalem.

William Styron
Through the healing process of time-and through medical intervention or hospitalization in many cases-most people survive depression which may be its only blessing; but to the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer.

William Styron
I read until I realized I was causing damage to my eyes. It was a kind of runaway lust.

William Styron
A writing course can only give you a start, and help a little. It can't teach writing. The professor should weed out the good from the bad, cull them like a farmer, and not encourage the ones who haven't got something.

William Styron
I like to stay up late at night and get drunk and sleep late. I wish I could break the habit but I can't. The afternoon is the only time I have left and I try to use it to the best advantage, with a hangover.

William Styron
The actual process of writing, though, demands complete, noiseless privacy, without even music; a baby howling two blocks away will drive me nuts.

William Styron
After my father died there wasn't any money. I had to work, you see, and Mr. Crowninshield, God rest his soul, paid twelve dollars for a small verse of mine and gave me a job at ten dollars a week.

William Styron
Many of the artifacts of my house had become potential devices for my own destruction: the attic rafters (and an outside maple or two) a means to hang myself, the garage a place to inhale carbon monoxide, the bathtub a vessel to receive the flow from my opened arteries. The kitchen knives in their drawers had but one purpose for me.

William Styron
The weather of Depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.

William Styron
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
I have learned to cry again and I think perhaps that means I am a human being again. Perhaps that at least. A piece of human being but, yes, a human being.

William Styron
I felt a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility - as if my body had actually become frail, hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy, lacking normal coordination. And soon I was in the throes of a pervasive hypochondria.

William Styron
Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.

William Styron
I try to get a feeling of what's going on in the story before I put it down on paper, but actually most of this breaking-in period is one long, fantastic daydream, in which I think about anything but the work at hand. I can't turn out slews of stuff each day. I wish I could. I seem to have some neurotic need to perfect each paragraph—each sentence, even—as I go along.

William Styron
I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.

William Styron
When, in the autumn of 1947, I was fired from the first and only job I have ever held, I wanted one thing out of life: to become a writer.

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 stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.

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
This was not judgment day — only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.

William Styron
I raise my eyes upward. There alone amidst the blue, steadfast, unmoving, fiery marvel of brightness, shines the morning star. Never has that star seemed so radiant, and I stand gazing at it and do not move though the chill of the damp floor imprisons my feet in piercing icebound pain.
Surely I come quickly …

William Styron
I shivered in the knowledge of the futility of all ambition. My mouth was sour with the yellow recollection of death and blood-smeared fields and walls. I watched the girl slip away, vanish without a hand laid upon her. Who knows but whether we were not doomed to lose. I know nothing any longer. Nothing. Did I really wish to vouchsafe a life for the one that I had taken?

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