Top 80 William Styron Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write – like myself – college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.”

— William Styron

52. “Maybe that’s the key to happiness – being sort of dumb, not wanting to know any of the answers.”

— William Styron

53. “An extermination center can only manufacture corpses; a society of total domination creates a world of the living dead...”

— William Styron

54. “The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis.”

— William Styron

55. “A great book should leave you with many experiences.”

— William Styron

56. “I think it’s unfortunate to have critics for friends.”

— William Styron

57. “And so you see, dear reader, the death of my friend Sophie forced me to realize that the whole universe is one big concentration camp run by God – the biggest Nazi of them all! So slavery in Virginia wasn’t all that bad. And it was really God’s fault anyway. Pretty good tragic insight there. Think I’ll crank some Bellamy Brothers and get loaded!”

— William Styron

58. “And when white men in they hate an’ wrath an’ meanness fetches blood from that beautiful black skin then, oh then, my brothers, it is time not fo’ laughing but fo’ weeping an’ rage an’ lamentation! Pride!” I cried after a pause, and let my arms descend. “Pride, pride, everlasting pride, pride will make you free!”

— William Styron

59. “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.”

— William Styron

60. “Writing is a form of self-flagellation.”

— William Styron

61. “It is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to normal life.”

— William Styron

62. “Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word – life.”

— William Styron

63. “Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls.”

— William Styron

64. “The danger is especially apparent if the young person is affected by what has been termed “incomplete mourning” – has, in effect, been unable to achieve the catharsis of grief, and so carries within himself through later years an insufferable burden of which rage and guilt, and not only dammed-up sorrow, are a part, and become the potential seeds of self-destruction. In.”

— William Styron

65. “Then I resolved that I would go back out there and somehow cope with the situation, despite the fact that I lacked a strategy and was frightened to the pit of my being.”

— William Styron

66. “Most people in the grip of depression at its ghastliest are, for whatever reason, in a state of unrealistic hopelessness, torn by exaggerated ills and fatal threats that bear no resemblance to actuality. It may require on the part of friends, lovers, family, admirers, an almost religious devotion to persuade the sufferers of life’s worth, which is so often in conflict with a sense of their own worthlessness, but such devotion has prevented countless suicides.”

— William Styron

67. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

— William Styron

68. “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

69. “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

70. “To make matters worse, I was out of a job and had very little money and was self-exiled to Flatbush – like others of my countrymen, another lean and lonesome Southerner wandering amid the Kingdom of the Jews.”

— William Styron

71. “Edward was at the stage of drunkenness in which the ego glows like a coal, and brilliant people become more inspired, but in which dull people, fired by the same inspiration, become only more dull.”

— William Styron

72. “We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.”

— William Styron

73. “He was made uneasy by unbraked hilarity and by extremes of sorrow alike, especially the latter; he preferred life to sail along pleasantly and evenly, and this, he knew, was for him a minor sort of tragedy.”

— William Styron

74. “This memory of my relative indifference is important because such indifference demonstrates powerfully the outsider’s inability to grasp the essence of the illness.”

— William Styron

75. “Through some happy accident of heredity he had escaped his father’s tediousness, while retaining a little of his mother’s jolly high spirits and humor. This did not make him anything special, but at least he was good-natured.”

— William Styron

76. “I thought there’s something to be said for honor in this world where there doesn’t seem to be any honor left. I thought that maybe happiness wasn’t really anything more than the knowledge of a life well spent, in spite of whatever immediate discomfort you had to undergo, and that if a life well spent meant compromises and conciliations and reconciliations, and suffering at the hands of the person you love, well then better that than live without honor.”

— William Styron

77. “Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.”

— William Styron

78. “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

79. “Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the brink. Which will be soon, and then the dark, and then be done with this ugliness...”

— William Styron

80. “Such was the vainglory of a black boy who may have been alone among his race in bondage to have actually read pages from Sir Walter Scott and who knew the product of nine multiplied by nine, the name of the President of the United States, the existence of the continent of Asia, the capital of the state of New Jersey, and could spell words like Deuteronomy, Revelation, Nehemiah, Chesapeake, Southampton, and Shenandoah.”

— William Styron

81. “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

82. “I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.”

— William Styron

83. “But my behavior was really the result of the illness, which had progressed far enough to produce some of its most famous and sinister hallmarks: confusion, failure of mental focus and lapse of memory.”

— William Styron

84. “While I was able to rise and function almost normally during the earlier part of the day, I began to sense the onset of the symptoms at midafternoon or a little later- -gloom crowding in on me, a sense of dread and alienation and, above all, stifling anxiety.”

— William Styron

85. “Of the many dreadful manifestations of the disease, both physical and psychological, a sense of self-hatred – or, put less categorically, a failure of self-esteem – is one of the most universally experienced symptoms, and I had suffered more and more from a general feeling of worthlessness as the malady had progressed.”

— William Styron

86. “For the first time in my life, which had for years been sometimes witlessly gregarious, I discovered the pain of unwanted solitude. Like a felon suddenly thrown into solitary confinement, I found myself feeding off the unburned fat of inward resources I barely knew I possessed.”

— William Styron

87. “Are there, as science fiction and Gnostic speculation imply, different species of time in the same world, ‘good time’ and enveloping folds of inhuman time, in which men fall into the slow hands of the living damnation?”

— William Styron

88. “Most people in the midst of disaster have yet one hope that lingers on some misty horizon – the possibility of love, money coming, the assurance that time cures all hurts, no matter how painful. But Loftis, gazing out at the meadow, had no such assurance; his deposit, it seemed, on all of life’s happiness had been withdrawn in full and his heart had shriveled within him like a collapsed balloon.”

— William Styron

89. “Further, Dr. Gold said with a straight face, the pill at optimum dosage could have the side effect of impotence. Until that moment, although I’d had some trouble with his personality, I had not thought him totally lacking in perspicacity; now I was not all sure. Putting myself in Dr. Gold’s shoes, I wondered if he seriously thought that this juiceless and ravaged semi-invalid with the shuffle and the ancient wheeze woke up each morning from his Halcion sleep eager for carnal fun.”

— William Styron