Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.
WILLIAM GOLDINGChildhood is a disease – a sickness that you grow out of.
More William Golding Quotes
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However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
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They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.
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He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.
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the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Which is better — to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is? Which is better — to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill? Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
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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.
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And I’ve been wearing specs since I was three.
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Philosophy and Religion-what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?
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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.
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Ralph… would treat the day’s decisions as though he were playing chess. The only trouble was that he would never be a very good chess player.
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Honestly, I haven’t the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.
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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.
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I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.
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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.
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We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.
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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.
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My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
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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.
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Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?
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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.
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We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?
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Heaven lies around us in our infancy.
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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.
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You have the older generation like Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson who are not as old as Graham Greene, but still are coming on. I dare say anyone who knew the scene better than I know it could fill it in with a very satisfactory supply of novels.
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Life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.
WILLIAM GOLDING