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 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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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 -
The greatest pleasure is not – say – sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity – well, that’s the job of the writer.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
There’s a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.
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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 -
We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
What kind of human person has a favorite eraser?
WILLIAM GOLDING -
He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don’t understand.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
We just got to go on, that’s all. That’s what grownups would do.
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 -
As soon as Oliver Twist is serialized, people who would never dream of reading [Charles] Dickens, if they hadn’t seen him on their box, buy the paperback.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
He 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.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I hope my books make statements about our general condition.
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His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.
WILLIAM GOLDING