People don’t help much.
WILLIAM GOLDINGPeople don’t help much.
WILLIAM GOLDINGLife should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.
WILLIAM GOLDINGTogether, joined in effort by the burden, they staggered up the last steep of the mountain. Together, they chanted One! Two! Three! and crashed the log on to the great pile. Then they stepped back, laughing with triumphant pleasure.
WILLIAM GOLDINGthe conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.
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 GOLDINGI do think that art that doesn’t communicate is useless.
WILLIAM GOLDINGAn orotundity, which I define as Nobelitis a pomposity in which one is treated as representative of more than oneself by someone conscious of representing more than himself.
WILLIAM GOLDINGSleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
WILLIAM GOLDINGHe who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.
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 GOLDINGWe just got to go on, that’s all. That’s what grownups would do.
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.
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 GOLDINGWhat a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
WILLIAM GOLDINGIf faces were different when lit from above or below — what was a face? What was anything?
WILLIAM GOLDINGI am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.
WILLIAM GOLDING