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?
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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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 -
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.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I’m scared of him,” said Piggy, “and that’s why I know him. If you’re scared of someone you hate him but you can’t stop thinking about him. You kid yourself he’s all right really, an’ then when you see him again; it’s like asthma an’ you can’t breathe.
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We’re not savages. We’re English.
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They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.
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There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.
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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.
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Life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.
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What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
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At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.
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Heaven lies around us in our infancy.
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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.
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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