William Styron Quotes

48 quotes in 791 categories

• I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.
• The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.
• The writer's duty is to keep on writing.
• 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.…
• 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…
• Let's face it, writing is hell.
• 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,…
• I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends.
• Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive...
• For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.
• Writing is a fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats... for jittery people.
• The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
• The weather of Depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.
• 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…
• You live several lives while reading [a good book].
• And when you get an eminent journal like Time magazine complaining, as it often has, that to the young writers of today life seems short…
• The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.
• Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls
• 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…
• Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation-who cares? The writer will be dead before…

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