Quote

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

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

More quotes by William Styron

Image
This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
William Styron
Image
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
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
The weather of Depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.
William Styron
Image
Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.
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
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
Image
The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.
William Styron
Image
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
William Styron
Image
I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.
William Styron
Image
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
Image
We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
William Styron
Image
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
Image
Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.
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
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
Image
I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends.
William Styron
Image
I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.
William Styron
Image
Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
William Styron
Image
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