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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.

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.
Life
Reading
Lives
Bibliophiles
Inspirational
Exhausted
Ends
Slightly
Live
Several
Book
Experiences
Many
Inspiring
Great
Leave

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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.
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Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.
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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
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Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.
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The pain of 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. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.
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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I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.
William Styron
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This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
William Styron
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Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
William Styron
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we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.
William Styron
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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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Let's face it, writing is hell.
William Styron
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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
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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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The pain is unrelenting one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
William Styron
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I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.
William Styron
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We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
William Styron
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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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Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.
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