Quote

The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.

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.
Unimaginable
Anguish
Suffered
Severe
Depression
Visible
Quite
Pain

More quotes by William Styron

Image
Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.
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
For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.
William Styron
Image
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.
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
Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can't quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.
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
The writer's duty is to keep on writing.
William Styron
Image
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
Image
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.
William Styron
Image
Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
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
The weather of Depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.
William Styron
Image
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.
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
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
Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.
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
Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls
William Styron
Image
Let your love flow out on all living things.
William Styron