Quote

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

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.
Faces
Fine
Pain
Started
Feelings
Hell
Wells
Pretty
Well
Feeling
Writing
Pleasure
Much
Face
Negated
Getting
Warm

More quotes by William Styron

Image
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.
William Styron
Image
we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.
William Styron
Image
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
William Styron
Image
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
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
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
Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.
William Styron
Image
Let's face it, writing is hell.
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
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.
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
Image
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.
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
Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
William Styron
Image
For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.
William Styron
Image
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
Image
Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
William Styron
Image
I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.
William Styron
Image
I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends.
William Styron
Image
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