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

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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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For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.
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Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
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The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
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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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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.
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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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A great book should leave you with many experiences.
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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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I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.
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Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
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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.
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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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