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we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.

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.
Devise
Intolerable
Escape
Means
Mean

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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.
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Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
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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.
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For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.
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Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.
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The pain is unrelenting one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
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The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.
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Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls
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A great book should leave you with many experiences.
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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.
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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.
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The writer's duty is to keep on writing.
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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.
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A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
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The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
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The weather of Depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.
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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.
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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.
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Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
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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.
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