This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we’ll have fun.
WILLIAM GOLDINGPercival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.
More William Golding Quotes
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Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Honestly, I haven’t the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Graham Greene at 82 years old was still writing, and I don’t think anyone can deny the force, the expertise, and the unique quality of his writing, if you take his complete oeuvre.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?
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 -
To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I hope my books make statements about our general condition.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Are we savages or what?
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Of the authors writing in English, I’d mention Shakespeare and Milton. But all this is terribly high-hat and makes me sound very po-faced, I’m afraid; however, I just happen to like these enormous, swinging, great creatures.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
We’re not savages. We’re English.
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 -
Together, joined in effort by the burden, they staggered up the last steep of the mountain. Together, they chanted One! Two! Three! and crashed the log on to the great pile. Then they stepped back, laughing with triumphant pleasure.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I play the piano passionately and inaccurately. Indeed, I worked out the other day that of my seventy-five years; I have spent at least one year sitting on a piano stool.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The candle-buds opened their wide white flowers….Their scent spilled out into the air and took possession of the island.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.
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 -
The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The thing is – fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
A crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in their beliefs. Man is a gregarious animal, and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way on the side of a hill.
WILLIAM GOLDING