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 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.
More William Golding Quotes
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The mask was a thing on it’s own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.
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But forgiveness must not only be given but received also.
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The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.
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The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers and won’t tell.
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There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.
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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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You’ll get back to where you came from.
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They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.
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Childhood is a disease – a sickness that you grow out of.
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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.
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Which is better–to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?
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I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.
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I hope my books make statements about our general condition.
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What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
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An 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.
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Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness.
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Together, 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.
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I’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.
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The thing is – fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream.
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Life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.
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We just got to go on, that’s all. That’s what grownups would do.
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The greatest ideas are the simplest.
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However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
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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.
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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.
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Even 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 GOLDING