William Styron Quotes

I went through this difficult time [in the 1984] when we were making our third record where I kind of lost my mind. That's when the bulimia kicked in. And that's when I got really freaky.

My soul is dark with stormy riot: directly traced over to diet.

Strong mental agitation and disturbance was no novelty to him, even before his late sufferings. It never is, to obstinate and sullen natures; for they struggle hard to be such.

It was such a depressing time. I didn't look very depressed, maybe, but it was really dire. I made a conscious decision not to stop, but it could have gone the other way.

I found that things weren't going well upstairs. Carter was a crumpled heap of chicken warrior on the slope of the pyramid.

I feel very troubled in the head and heart.

I think I'm drawn to characters with complexity or who are under duress in some way and have some conflict going on.

There's something messed up with my brain.

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.

…I hate myself for not being able to go downstairs naturally and seek comfort in numbers. I hate myself for having to sit here and be torn between I know not what within me.

The gloom encroaches upon my mind, and my heart flutters like a bird held fast in a fist.

You cannot escape what you have to deal with inside yourself. It will never bring good things. It will only bring madness.

I definitely have some kind of mental problem and I haven't pinpointed what it is.

Look at it this way: There are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100 percent, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation.

It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.

Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation.

...too much sadness hath congealed your blood,And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.

When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.

[Neurotics are] torn by inner conflicts ... Every neurotic ... is at war with himself.

There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.

...grief can derange even the strongest and most disciplined of minds.

But day after day of depression, the kind that doesn’t seem to merit carting me off to a hospital but allows me to sit here on this stoop in summer camp as if I were normal, day after day wearing down everybody who gets near me. My behavior seems, somehow, not acute enough for them to know what to do with me, though I’m just enough of a mess to be driving everyone around me crazy.

Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.

i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.

Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.