William Styron Quotes

I try to get a feeling of what's going on in the story before I put it down on paper, but actually most of this breaking-in period is one long, fantastic daydream, in which I think about anything but the work at hand. I can't turn out slews of stuff each day. I wish I could. I seem to have some neurotic need to perfect each paragraph—each sentence, even—as I go along.

William Styron

• Thinking
• Long
• Writing
• Perfect
• Feelings

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Quotes to Explore

• You can be tops in Australia and be unheard of everywhere else.

  

  Barry Gibb Bee Gees
  • You
  • Australia
  • Everywhere

• I've always made sequels, even when I was making Super 8 movies if the audience liked it.

  

  Sam Raimi
  • Always
  • Audience
  • Movies

• My failures have been errors in judgment, not of intent.

  

  Ulysses S. Grant
  • Judgment
  • Errors
  • Failures

• Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.

  

  A. R. Ammons
  • Poetry
  • Years
  • Living

• There is no easy way to get around horrible people on the Internet, and it's either just leave it or don't and get sucked into the whirlwind of it all.

  

  Maisie Williams
  • People
  • Easy
  • Internet

• Floyd Mayweather is in the sport to give great performances.

  

  Floyd Mayweather, Jr.
  • Great
  • Give
  • Floyd

• My choosing Islam was not a political statement; it was a spiritual statement.

  

  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
  • Political
  • Spiritual
  • Islam

• The Arab representatives and their followers were not interested in the persecuted millions throughout the world; they were fixed on a political agenda that distracted the world from their own serious shortcomings in the human-rights department.

  

  Jack Schwartz
  • World
  • Political
  • Serious

• You know, my mum's always encouraged me and never made my gender an issue, I guess. She brought me up to believe in equality, as opposed to feminism or sexism – so it just meant that my gender was not relevant to what I was capable of achieving.

  

  Paloma Faith
  • Believe
  • Know
  • Equality

• You have to open up on stage.

  

  Karen O
  • Up
  • You
  • Stage

• I have always loved animals and groomed friends' horses as a child. I think I may have even ridden the odd seaside donkey in my early years.

  

  Victoria Pendleton
  • May
  • Friends
  • Child

• I am grateful that I'm working, but I also have to say I've worked really, really hard and had to fight a lot.

  

  Patricia Riggen
  • Fight
  • Working
  • Hard

• A writer has a difficult fate, but a Jewish writer has an especially difficult fate. His soul is torn; he lives on two streets with three languages. It is a misfortune to live on this sort of 'border,' and that is what I have experienced.

  

  S. Ansky
  • Live
  • Soul
  • Fate

• In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances, invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.

  

  Oscar Wilde
  • Science
  • Crazy
  • Poverty

• Unwearied ceaseless effort is the price that must be paid for turning faith into a rich infallible experience.

  

  Mahatma Gandhi
  • Experience
  • Faith
  • Effort

• I've been playing my instrument since I was about three or four. That's when I started banging around on the piano, trying to be like The Beatles.

  

  Nat Wolff
  • Trying
  • Three
  • Piano

• I want to go against the best fighters. That's why I'm always calling out Georges St-Pierre. I don't have anything against Georges St-Pierre. I think he's a great fighter.

  

  Nate Diaz
  • Great
  • Why
  • Think

• We have a sufficient political class, and the military doesn't have to get involved in high national office. The days of doing that, post-Civil War and post-World War II, are gone.

  

  Jack Keane
  • World
  • War
  • High

• Like all sciences, chemistry is marked by magic moments. For someone fortunate enough to live such a moment, it is an instant of intense emotion: an immense field of investigation suddenly opens up before you.

  

  Yves Chauvin
  • Up
  • Live
  • Moments

• I'm always afraid someone's going to tap me on the shoulder one day and say, 'Back to North London.'

  

  Alan Parker

• The act of focusing our mightiest intellectual resources on the elusive goal of goto-less programs has helped us get our minds off all those really tough and possibly unresolvable problems and issues with which today's professional programmer would otherwise have to grapple.

  

  Patrick Henry
  • Today
  • Professional

• I left Gorbachev's office thinking that everything about him was outsized: his achievements, his mistakes, and, now, his vanity and bitterness.

  

  David Remnick
  • Thinking

• It's not those who write the laws that have the greatest impact on society. It's those who write the songs.

  

  Blaise Pascal
  • Society
  • Write
  • Laws

• I try to get a feeling of what's going on in the story before I put it down on paper, but actually most of this breaking-in period is one long, fantastic daydream, in which I think about anything but the work at hand. I can't turn out slews of stuff each day. I wish I could. I seem to have some neurotic need to perfect each paragraph—each sentence, even—as I go along.

  

  William Styron
  • Thinking
  • Long
  • Writing