Quotes from William Styron

Why, I think, as you say, to wit, that they are bad times, and bad they will be, until men are better; for they are bad men that make bad times; if men, therefore, would mend, so would the times. It is a folly to look for good days so long as sin is so high, and those that study its nourishment so many

It was true that I had traveled great distances for one so young, but my spirit had remained landlocked, unacquainted with love and all but a stranger to death…I had absented myself in my smug and airless self-deprivation.

Somehow I still could not believe that this life we all have together would ever be changed.

almost unique in Eastern Europe in possessing its own constitution, called even now "the Magdeburg rights" and based upon medieval laws formulated in the city of Magdeburg? Was

Mercifully, I was at that age when reading was still a passion and thus, save for a happy marriage, the best state possible in which to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

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Loftis, gazing out at the meadow, had no such assurance; his deposit, it seemed, on all of life's happiness had been withdrawn in full and his heart had shriveled within him like a collapsed balloon.

There is only one way out--up the chimney.

She was determined to put behind her the madness of the past—or as much as a vulnerable and memory-racked mind permitted—

If I am no longer able to function with you, it is, you understand, due to no lack of virility but because almost everything about you, especially your body, leaves me totally without sensation... I

I would give almost anything I own to be alive when that day comes, as it surely will, when Harry Byrd sees negro men and women sitting not at the back of the bus but riding free and equal through all the streets of Virginia. For that I would willingly be called that hateful epithet "nigger lover," which I am sure I am called already in private by many

I did not weep for the six million Jews or the two million Poles or the one million Serbs or the five million Russians -- I was unprepared to weep for all humanity -- but I did weep for these others who in one way or another had become dear to me, and my sobs made an unashamed racket across the abandoned beach

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.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.

The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.