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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.
Ready
Fire
Universe
Felt
Men
Released
Burning
Slavery

More quotes by 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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Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls
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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Most books, like their authors, are born to die of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them they live, and their influence lives forever.
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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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
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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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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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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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Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.
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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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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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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Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.
William Styron
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Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.
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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Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
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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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