Quote

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

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

More quotes by William Styron

Image
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
Image
For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.
William Styron
Image
Let your love flow out on all living things.
William Styron
Image
I have learned to cry again and I think perhaps that means I am a human being again. Perhaps that at least. A piece of human being but, yes, a human being.
William Styron
Image
Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.
William Styron
Image
It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
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
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
Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
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
A great book should leave you with many experiences.
William Styron
Image
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
William Styron
Image
Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.
William Styron
Image
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.
William Styron
Image
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
Image
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
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
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
we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.
William Styron
Image
Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.
William Styron