The Navy’s a very gentlemanly business. You fire at the horizon to sink a ship and then you pull people out of the water and say, ‘Frightfully sorry, old chap.’
WILLIAM GOLDINGThe writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he’s written it.
More William Golding Quotes
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Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.
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 -
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 -
I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.
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 -
Childhood is a disease – a sickness that you grow out of.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I’ve come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
It may be — I hope it is — redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
We’re not savages. We’re English.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he’s written it.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Are we savages or what?
WILLIAM GOLDING