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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.
Fire
Universe
Felt
Men
Released
Burning
Slavery
Ready

More quotes by 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 stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.
William Styron
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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
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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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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
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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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Through the healing process of time-and through medical intervention or hospitalization in many cases-most people survive depression which may be its only blessing but to the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer.
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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Let's face it, writing is hell.
William Styron
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We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
William Styron
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The weather of Depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.
William Styron
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I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends.
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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I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.
William Styron
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The pain of depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.
William Styron
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This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
William Styron
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we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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The writer's duty is to keep on writing.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron