William Styron Short Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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