William Styron Quotes

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.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time — for jittery people.

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.

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.

The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

A great book should leave you with many experiences.

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

It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.

The pain is unrelenting; one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.

Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the brink.

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.

Writing is a form of self-flagellation.

Let your love flow out on all living things.

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.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.

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

we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.

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

I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.

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

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

I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends.

What I really mean is that a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

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

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

Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.

Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls

Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.

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

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

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

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.

Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can't quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.

Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.

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.

Then I resolved that I would go back out there and somehow cope with the situation, despite the fact that I lacked a strategy and was frightened to the pit of my being.

The pain of severe 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.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it." -- William Styron (born June 11 1925)

A good book should leave you....slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a happy bunch of chuckleheads.

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.