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 GOLDINGI 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.
More William Golding Quotes
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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 -
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 -
I do think that art that doesn’t communicate is useless.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Which is better — to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is? Which is better — to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill? Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
WILLIAM GOLDING -
However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don’t understand.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers and won’t tell.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
No human endeavour can ever be wholly good… it must always have a cost.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
And I’ve been wearing specs since I was three.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
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 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.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Worse than madness. Sanity.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The greatest ideas are the simplest.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.
WILLIAM GOLDING