William Styron Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what [a] friend of mine called the fleas of life —you know, colds, hangovers, bills, sprained ankles, and little nuisances of one sort or another.

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
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
The purpose of a young writer is to write, and he shouldn't drink too much. He shouldn't think that after he's written one book he's God Almighty and air all his immature opinions in pompous interviews. Let's have another cognac and go up to Le Chapelain.

William Styron
For over seventy-five years the word has slithered through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.
On depression

William Styron
We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.

William Styron
I discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. Certainly I have written enough of it to demonstrate that I harbor no disdain for literary journalism or just plain journalism, under whose sponsorship I have been able to express much that has fascinated me, or alarmed me, or amused me, or otherwise engaged my attention when I was not writing a book.

William Styron
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.

William Styron
My brain, in thrall to its outlaw hormones, had become less an organ of thought than an instrument registering, minute by minute, varying degrees of its own suffering.

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
Her thought process dwindled, ceased. Then she felt her legs crumple. "I can't choose! I can't choose!"

William Styron
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
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
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
It could be all unwittingly that I wrote in Darkness Visible what amounted to a Rosetta stone for my other work.

William Styron
In depression this 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. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying — or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity — but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.

William Styron
Depression is a wimp of a word for a howling tempest in the brain.

William Styron
I would have done it all again. I would have destroyed them all. Yet I would have spared one. I would have spared her that showed me Him whose presence I had not fathomed or maybe never even known. Great God, how early it is! Until now I had almost forgotten His name.
Come! the voice booms, but commanding me now: Come, My son! I turn in surrender.
Surely I come quickly. Amen.
Even so, come, Lord Jesus.
Oh how bright and fair the morning star …

William Styron
In depression this 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.... And this results in a striking experience—one which I have called, borrowing military terminology, the situation of the walking wounded.

William Styron
Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz.

William Styron
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.

William Styron