Quote

The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

William Styron

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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.
Duty
Writer
Keep
Writing

More quotes by William Styron

Image
This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
William Styron
Image
It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
William Styron
Image
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
Image
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.
William Styron
Image
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
Image
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.
William Styron
Image
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.
William Styron
Image
Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.
William Styron
Image
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
Image
In the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do-by the skin of our teeth.
William Styron
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.
William Styron
Image
Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.
William Styron
Image
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.
William Styron
Image
Let's face it, writing is hell.
William Styron
Image
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.
William Styron
Image
A disruption of the circadian cycle—the metabolic and glandular rhythms that are central to our workaday life—seems to be involved in many, if not most, cases of depression this is why brutal insomnia so often occurs and is most likely why each day’s pattern of distress exhibits fairly predictable alternating periods of intensity and relief.
William Styron
Image
Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls
William Styron
Image
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.
William Styron