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 GOLDINGAt the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.
More William Golding Quotes
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What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I hope my books make statements about our general condition.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The candle-buds opened their wide white flowers….Their scent spilled out into the air and took possession of the island.
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 -
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.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Heaven lies around us in our infancy.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.
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 -
However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers and won’t tell.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
But forgiveness must not only be given but received also.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The greatest ideas are the simplest.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.
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 -
The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don’t understand.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?
WILLIAM GOLDING -
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 -
People don’t help much.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The water rose further and dressed Simon’s coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble.
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 -
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 -
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 -
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