Quote

Writing is a form of self-flagellation.

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.
Writing
Flagellation
Form
Self

More quotes by William Styron

Image
Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.
William Styron
Image
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.
William Styron
Image
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.
William Styron
Image
Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.
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
Image
We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
William Styron
Image
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
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 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
Image
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
William Styron
Image
A great book should leave you with many experiences.
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
I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.
William Styron
Image
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
Image
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
Image
For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.
William Styron
Image
Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.
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
Many of the artifacts of my house had become potential devices for my own destruction: the attic rafters (and an outside maple or two) a means to hang myself, the garage a place to inhale carbon monoxide, the bathtub a vessel to receive the flow from my opened arteries. The kitchen knives in their drawers had but one purpose for me.
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