Sourced

• Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word — life. Certainly this might be an age of so-called faithlessness and despair we live in, but the new writers haven’t cornered any market on faithlessness and despair, any more than Dostoyevsky or Marlowe or Sophocles did. Every age has its terrible aches and pains, its peculiar new horrors, and every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what that same friend of mine calls “the fleas of life”—you know, colds, hangovers, bills, sprained ankles, and little nuisances of one sort or another. They are the constants of life, at the core of life, along with nice little delights that come along every now and then.
  • The Paris Review (Spring 1954)

• A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
  • Interview in Writers at Work, First Series (1958), edited by George Plimpton.

• The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
  • Writers at Work (1958)

• I discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. Certainly I have written enough of it to demonstrate that I harbor no disdain for literary journalism or just plain journalism, under whose sponsorship I have been able to express much that has fascinated me, or alarmed me, or amused me, or otherwise engaged my attention when I was not writing a book.
  • "A note to the reader" - This Quiet Dust and Other Writings (1982)

• 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. I left my position as manuscript reader at the McGraw-Hill Book Company with no regrets; the job had been onerous and boring. It did not occur to me that there would be many difficulties to impede my ambition; in fact, the job itself had been an impediment. All I knew was that I burned to write a novel and I could not have cared less that my bank account was close to zero, with no replenishment in sight. At the age of twenty-two I had such pure hopes in my ability to write not just a respectable first novel, but a novel that would be completely out of the ordinary, that when I left the McGraw-Hill Building for the last time I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.
  • "Lie Down In Darkness" - This Quiet Dust and Other Writings (1982)

• In Paris on a chilling evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind — a struggle which had engaged me for several months — might have a fatal outcome.
  • Darkness Visible (1990) First lines.

• 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. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode.
  • Darkness Visible (1990)

• 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 — not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying — or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity — but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
  • Darkness Visible (1990)

• My brain, in thrall to its outlaw hormones, had become less an organ of thought than an instrument registering, minute by minute, varying degrees of its own suffering.
  • Darkness Visible (1990)

• It could be all unwittingly that I wrote in Darkness Visible what amounted to a Rosetta stone for my other work.
  • "A Conversation with William Styron", Humanities (May/June 1997)

• 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.
  • "A Conversation with William Styron", Humanities (May/June 1997)

Sophie's Choice (1979)

• Her thought process dwindled, ceased. Then she felt her legs crumple. "I can't choose! I can't choose!"
  • Ch. 15

• Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz.
  • Ch. 16

• Let your love flow out on all living things. These words at some level have the quality of a strapping homily. Nonetheless, they are remarkably beautiful, strung together in their honest lump-like English syllables... Let your love flow out on all living things.
  But there are a couple of problems with this precept of mine. The first is, of course, that it is not mine. It springs from the universe and is the property of God, and the words have been intercepted — on the wing, so to speak — by such mediators as Lao-tzu, Jesus, Gautama Buddha and thousands upon thousands of lesser prophets, including your narrator, who heard the terrible truth of their drumming somewhere between Baltimore and Wilmington and set them down with the fury of a madman sculpting in stone.
  • Ch. 16

• This was not judgement day — only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
  • Last lines.