177 Quotes by 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.

But oh, my brothers, black folk ain’t never goin’ to be led from bondage without they has pride! Black folk ain’t goin’ to be free, they ain’t goin’ to have no spoonbread an’ sweet cider less’n they studies to love they own selves. Only then will the first be last, and the last first.

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.

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

The libido also made an early exit, as it does in most major illnesses – it is the superfluous need of a body in beleaguered emergency.

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

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

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.

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.