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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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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.
First
Fully
Chill
Mind
Aware
Outcome
Became
Disorder
Late
Outcomes
Months
Paris
Struggle
Several
Chilling
Might
Engaged
October
Firsts
Evening
Fatal

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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.
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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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The pain is unrelenting one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
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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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Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.
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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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This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
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Let your love flow out on all living things.
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We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
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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.
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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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Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
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Let's face it, writing is hell.
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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.
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Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.
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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.
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