We just got to go on, that’s all. That’s what grownups would do.
WILLIAM GOLDINGI 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.
More William Golding Quotes
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The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Are we savages or what?
WILLIAM GOLDING -
And I’ve been wearing specs since I was three.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I hope my books make statements about our general condition.
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 -
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 -
If I blow the conch and they don’t come back; then we’ve had it. We shan’t keep the fire going. We’ll be like animals. We’ll never be rescued.” “If you don’t blow, we’ll soon be animals anyway.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Philosophy and Religion-what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?
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 -
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 -
Life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The thing is – fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream.
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Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don’t understand.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The rules!” shouted Ralph, “you’re breaking the rules!” “Who cares?
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he’s written it.
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 -
We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.
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 -
We’re not savages. We’re English.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Worse than madness. Sanity.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
WILLIAM GOLDING