We’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 GOLDINGIn India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so.
More William Golding Quotes
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We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.
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I do think that art that doesn’t communicate is useless.
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The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The greatest ideas are the simplest.
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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 -
One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.
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We just got to go on, that’s all. That’s what grownups would do.
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He 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 GOLDING -
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 -
Philosophy and Religion-what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?
WILLIAM GOLDING -
It wasn’t until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you’ve got to write your own books and nobody else’s, and then everything followed from there.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The mask was a thing on it’s own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.
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He doesn’t mind if he dies… indeed, he would like to die; but yet he fears to fall. He would welcome a long sleep; but not at the price of falling to it.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
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.’
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The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers and won’t tell.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Are we savages or what?
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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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No human endeavour can ever be wholly good… it must always have a cost.
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You have the older generation like Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson who are not as old as Graham Greene, but still are coming on. I dare say anyone who knew the scene better than I know it could fill it in with a very satisfactory supply of novels.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
It may be — I hope it is — redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I don’t think they [contemporary writers] read me either. I mean, if we’re concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work.
WILLIAM GOLDING