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 GOLDINGThe world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.
More William Golding Quotes
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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.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The mask was a thing on it’s own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.
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 -
Which is better–to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?
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 -
People don’t help much.
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 -
However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
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 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 -
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 -
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 -
Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.
WILLIAM GOLDING