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

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We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
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This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
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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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we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.
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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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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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Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.
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The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.
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I'm simply the happiest, the placidest, when I'm writing, and so I suppose that that, for me, is the final answer. ... It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time.
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Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
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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 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 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.
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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 pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
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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.
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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.
William Styron
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A great book should leave you with many experiences.
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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 it's unfortunate to have critics for friends.
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