Which is better–to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?
WILLIAM GOLDINGEven if you got rid of paper, you would still have story-tellers. In fact, you had the story-tellers before you had the paper.
More William Golding Quotes
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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 -
At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
We’re not savages. We’re English.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
No human endeavour can ever be wholly good… it must always have a cost.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
While I am on, I can discipline myself to that extent. When I am off, I can’t discipline myself at all. On the other hand, when I am off, there are so many things I like doing, it doesn’t really matter.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
He lost himself in a maze of thoughts that were rendered vague by his lack of words to express them. Frowning, he tried again.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The greatest ideas are the simplest.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?
WILLIAM GOLDING -
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 GOLDING -
Of the authors writing in English, I’d mention Shakespeare and Milton. But all this is terribly high-hat and makes me sound very po-faced, I’m afraid; however, I just happen to like these enormous, swinging, great creatures.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.
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And I’ve been wearing specs since I was three.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us.
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 -
Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.
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.
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What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
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I hope my books make statements about our general condition.
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Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
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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.
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However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The rules!” shouted Ralph, “you’re breaking the rules!” “Who cares?
WILLIAM GOLDING