William Styron

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”

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

“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.”

“In depression this 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.”

“The writer's duty is to keep on writing.”

“Mysteriously, and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.”

“The most sublime of all human emotions is the passion to create.”

“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.”

“For in this sick-room, even the doctors' presence is oppressive, a constant reminder of my own helplessness.”

“Death is the starlit strip between the companionship of yesterday and the reunion of tomorrow.”

“Love is not enough. But, it is the rock on which all else stands.”

“So much of the pain of depression is tied up with memory.”

“It is not a writer's job to solve themes, it is his job to ask questions.”