What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?
WILLIAM GOLDINGHe 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.
More William Golding Quotes
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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.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I really feel the novel has certain conveniences about it and has something so fundamental about it you could almost say that as long as there is paper, there is going to be the novel.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.
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 -
Worse than madness. Sanity.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Percival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.
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 -
Philosophy and Religion-what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?
WILLIAM GOLDING -
This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we’ll have fun.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I began to write when I was seven, and I have been writing off and on ever since. It is still off and on. You can say that when I am on, when I know I have a book which I am going to write, then I write two thousand words a day. That’s so many pages longhand.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
He doesn’t mind if he dies… indeed, he would like to die; but yet he fears to fall. He would welcome a long sleep; but not at the price of falling to it.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
It wasn’t until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you’ve got to write your own books and nobody else’s, and then everything followed from there.
WILLIAM GOLDING






