William Styron Quotes
-
Further, Dr. Gold said with a straight face, the pill at optimum dosage could have the side effect of impotence. Until that moment, although I'd had some trouble with his personality, I had not thought him totally lacking in perspicacity; now I was not all sure. Putting myself in Dr. Gold's shoes, I wondered if he seriously thought that this juiceless and ravaged semi-invalid with the shuffle and the ancient wheeze woke up each morning from his Halcion sleep eager for carnal fun.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Let your love flow out on all living things.
→ -
The weather of Depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.
→ -
Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.
→ -
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.
→ -
Like Hemingway and Faulkner, but in an entirely different mode, Fitzgerald had that singular quality without which a writer is not really a writer at all, and that is a voice, a distinct and identifiable voice. This is really not the same thing as a style; a style can be emulated, a voice cannot, and the witty, rueful, elegaic voice gives his work its bright authenticity.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time — for jittery people.
→ -
The writer's duty is to keep on writing.
→ -
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.
→ -
Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.
→ -
we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.
→ -
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
→ -
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.
→ -
Let's face it, writing is hell.
→ -
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.
→ -
Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.
→ -
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
→ -
The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.
→ -
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.
→ -
The pain is unrelenting; one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
→ -
It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
→ -
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.
→
Related Authors
-
Saul Bellow Writer -
Philip Roth Novelist -
F. Scott Fitzgerald Author -
James Joyce Novelist -
William Faulkner Writer -
John Steinbeck Author -
Joseph Heller Novelist -
Meryl Streep Actress -
Richard Yates Novelist -
George Plimpton Journalist -
John Updike Novelist -
Kingsley Amis Novelist -
-
Kay Redfield Jamison Psychologist -
Romain Gary Diplomat -
Norman Mailer Novelist -
James Jones Author -
Alan J. Pakula Film director -
Peter Matthiessen Novelist