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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

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William Styron
Age: 81 †
Born: 1925
Born: June 11
Died: 2006
Died: November 1
Military Personnel
Novelist
Writer
Newport News
Virginia
William Clark Styron
Jr.
Writing
Writers
Good
Products
Always
Along
Came
Neurosis
Literature
Mighty
Age
Dull
Happy
Product
Someone
Bunch

More quotes by William Styron

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Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can't quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.
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The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.
William Styron
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In depression . . . 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 . . . It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
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It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time — for jittery people.
William Styron
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The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.
William Styron
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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
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Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
William Styron
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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
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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
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The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
William Styron
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We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
William Styron
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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
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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
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The writer's duty is to keep on writing.
William Styron
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Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.
William Styron
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I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.
William Styron
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For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.
William Styron
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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
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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
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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