Let's face it, writing is hell.
Interpretation
Writing can be an incredibly difficult and painful process.
William Styron's quote highlights the struggles and challenges that writers often face in their creative process. It suggests that despite the passion and joy that can come from writing, it is often accompanied by feelings of frustration, doubt, and hardship, making it a taxing endeavor akin to 'hell'.
In practice
In a writing workshop, a facilitator might share this quote to encourage participants to embrace the difficulties of their craft.
The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.
my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
In depression . . . 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 . . . It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
Writing is a fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats... for jittery people.
To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have to be immersed in the world, you have to go out looking for it. This becomes harder as you get older because there's less energy, the days are shorter for older people and it's not so easy to go out and immerse oneself in the world outside.
The goal of an artist is to create the definitive work that cannot be surpassed.
The Beauty raised her eyes, the only part of her that was truly beautiful.
Truly great images make all the other millions of images you look at unimportant. You gotta look at an image and understand it in a nanosecond.
To be an artist, you need to exist in a world of silence.
The beauty of jazz is that it's malleable. People are addressing it to suit their own personalities.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.