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

• I really believe that when you're playing a character that everything is contained in the script. If I'm pulling from things from my own life, then I think I'm being disingenuous to the character and the story.

  

  Walton Goggins
  • Life
  • Believe
  • Character

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

  

  Floyd Mayweather, Jr.
  • Great
  • Give
  • Floyd

• Hindi films are so deceptive. I thought Mumbai was this big, grand, beautiful city with sea-facing flats.

  

  Yami Gautam
  • Beautiful
  • City
  • Thought

• The Passion narratives are the first pieces of the Gospels that were composed as a unity.

  

  Hans Urs von Balthasar
  • Passion
  • First
  • Unity

• 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

• Our sport is not made for anybody to be able to play it, especially at the NFL level, so there's obviously some risk that we all take knowingly.

  

  Troy Polamalu
  • Sports
  • Risk
  • Made

• I freely admit that I took great license in writing 'The Dark Queen,' more so than my other historical romance novels. This is largely because I viewed the book as a fantasy novel as much as an historical. I do feel that writers should strive for as much accuracy as possible but, in the end, remember that we are writing fiction.

  

  Susan Carroll
  • Writing
  • Fiction
  • Historical

• Intertribal aggression, escalating in some cultures to limited warfare, is common enough to be regarded as a general characteristic of hunter-gatherer social behavior.

  

  E. O. Wilson

• I hope we have learned throughout centuries of revolution and reaction that it's really a shift in consciousness that we need. And I think there is a shift in consciousness among our human species. I think the human species is evolving, spiritually.

  

  Elizabeth Lesser
  • Hope
  • Revolution
  • Consciousness

• 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