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I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.

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.
Burning
Slavery
Ready
Fire
Universe
Felt
Men
Released

More quotes by William Styron

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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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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 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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Let's face it, writing is hell.
William Styron
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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
William Styron
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The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.
William Styron
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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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For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.
William Styron
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The writer's duty is to keep on writing.
William Styron
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The pain is unrelenting one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
William Styron
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Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
William Styron
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Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.
William Styron
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Let your love flow out on all living things.
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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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
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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.
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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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
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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.
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