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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.

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.
Answer
Threats
Fine
Happiest
Answers
Therapy
Simply
Final
Writing
Finals
Time
Suppose
People
Scared
Perpetually
Threat
Nameless

More quotes by William Styron

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my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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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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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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Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
William Styron
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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.
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.
William Styron
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In the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do-by the skin of our teeth.
William Styron
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We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
William Styron
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It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
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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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
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Let your love flow out on all living things.
William Styron
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Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.
William Styron
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Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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I felt myself no longer a husk but a body with some of the body's sweet juices stirring again. I had my first dream in many months, confused but to this day imperishable, with a flute in it somewhere, and a wild goose, and a dancing girl.
William Styron
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we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.
William Styron
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Many of the artifacts of my house had become potential devices for my own destruction: the attic rafters (and an outside maple or two) a means to hang myself, the garage a place to inhale carbon monoxide, the bathtub a vessel to receive the flow from my opened arteries. The kitchen knives in their drawers had but one purpose for me.
William Styron
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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