59+ William Styron Quotes (Dramatic, Poetic And Emotive)

William Styron was an American novelist and essayist known for his works of literature that explored the dark complexities of the human condition. His most famous works include Sophie's Choice, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Darkness Visible. He was a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction.

Top 10 William Styron Quotes

1. 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.
2. A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time — for jittery people.
6. The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
7. The pain is unrelenting; one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
8. A great book should leave you with many experiences.
9. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Let your love flow out on all living things.
• The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.
• I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.
• This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
• I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.
• The weather of Depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.
• Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.
• I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends.
• Let's face it, writing is hell.
• The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

William Styron Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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. — William Styron

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

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

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

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. — William Styron

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it. — William Styron

For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year. — William Styron

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

The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs. — William Styron

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

Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls — William Styron

Like Hemingway and Faulkner, but in an entirely different mode, Fitzgerald had that singular quality without which a writer is not really a writer at all, and that is a voice, a distinct and identifiable voice. This is really not the same thing as a style; a style can be emulated, a voice cannot, and the witty, rueful, elegaic voice gives his work its bright authenticity. — William Styron

I discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. Certainly I have written enough of it to demonstrate that I harbor no disdain for literary journalism or just plain journalism, under whose sponsorship I have been able to express much that has fascinated me, or alarmed me, or amused me, or otherwise engaged my attention when I was not writing a book. — William Styron

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

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

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

Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life. — William Styron

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

I think that the best of my generation...have reversed the customary rules of the game and have grown more radical as they have gotten older - a disconcerting but healthy sign. To be sure, there are many youngish old fogies around and even the most illustrious of these, William Buckley, is blessed by a puzzling, recondite but undeniable charm, almost as if beneath that patrician exterior an egalitarian was signaling to get out. — William Styron

[However], the sufferer from depression has no option, and therefore finds himself, like a walking casualty of war, thrust into the most intolerable social and family situations. There he must ... present a face approximating the one associated with ordinary events and companionship. He must try to utter small talk and be responsive to questions, and knowingly nod, and frown and, God help him, even smile. — William Styron

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it. — William Styron

We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves. — William Styron

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. — William Styron

Writing is a form of self-flagellation. — William Styron

Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be. — William Styron

we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable. — William Styron

Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing. — William Styron

In the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do-by the skin of our teeth. — William Styron

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

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 rememdy will come, not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. — William Styron

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

A great book of literature should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. — William Styron

The madness of depression is 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

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

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

What this country needs... what this great land of ours needs is something to happen to it. Something ferocious and tragic, like what happened to Jericho or the cities of the plain - something terrible I mean, son, so that when the people have been through hellfire and the crucible, and have suffered agony enough and grief, they’ll be people again, human beings, not a bunch of smug contented cows rooting at the trough. — William Styron

I try to get a feeling of what's going on in the story before I put it down on paper, but actually most of this breaking-in period is one long, fantastic daydream, in which I think about anything but the work at hand. I can't turn out slews of stuff each day. I wish I could. I seem to have some neurotic need to perfect each paragraph—each sentence, even—as I go along. — William Styron

Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay. — William Styron

Life Lessons by William Styron

1. William Styron's novels often explore themes of personal struggle and resilience, demonstrating that even in the face of adversity, we can find strength and hope.
2. His works also emphasize the importance of understanding and empathy, as well as the power of storytelling to bring people together.
3. Finally, Styron's works often highlight the importance of standing up for what is right and fighting for justice, no matter the cost.