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 GOLDINGWhich 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 GOLDINGHe 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 GOLDINGServe you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!
WILLIAM GOLDINGOne tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.
WILLIAM GOLDINGThe 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 GOLDINGWe’re all mad, the whole damned race. We’re wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we’re all mad and in solitary confinement.
WILLIAM GOLDINGEvery 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 GOLDINGMarx, 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 GOLDINGThere were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.
WILLIAM GOLDINGOnly one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.
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.
WILLIAM GOLDINGAnd I’ve been wearing specs since I was three.
WILLIAM GOLDINGI 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 GOLDINGI do think that art that doesn’t communicate is useless.
WILLIAM GOLDINGI began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.
WILLIAM GOLDINGI’ve come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.
WILLIAM GOLDING