An orotundity, which I define as Nobelitis a pomposity in which one is treated as representative of more than oneself by someone conscious of representing more than himself.
WILLIAM GOLDINGHowever you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
More William Golding Quotes
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Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.
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Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I will tell you what man is. He is a freak, an ejected foetus robbed of his natural development, thrown out into the world with a naked covering of parchment, with too little room for his teeth and a soft bulging skull like a bubble. But nature stirs a pudding there.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
He became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things. He talked to them, urging them, ordering them. Driven back by the tide, his footprints became bays in which they were trapped and gave him the illusion of mastery.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Even if you got rid of paper, you would still have story-tellers. In fact, you had the story-tellers before you had the paper.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Percival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!
WILLIAM GOLDING -
In India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to be an autobiography. That’s what you could say about it.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Beethoven for listening; Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven for playing as well as Bach and Prokofiev and so on. If I kept going, this list would spiral. It’s as wide as literature; in fact, it is probably wider.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life,where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one’s waking life was spent watching one’s feet.
WILLIAM GOLDING






