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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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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.
Longer
Stirring
Girl
Juice
Husk
Felt
Confused
Imperishable
Dream
Wild
Juices
Body
Dancing
Flute
Firsts
Somewhere
Flutes
First
Sweet
Goose
Many
Months
Geese

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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.
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Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
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My life and work have been far from free of blemish, and so I think it would be unpardonable for a biographer not to dish up the dirt.
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Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
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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.
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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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A disruption of the circadian cycle—the metabolic and glandular rhythms that are central to our workaday life—seems to be involved in many, if not most, cases of depression this is why brutal insomnia so often occurs and is most likely why each day’s pattern of distress exhibits fairly predictable alternating periods of intensity and relief.
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This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
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The writer's duty is to keep on writing.
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We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
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The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.
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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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The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.
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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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The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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