Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.
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.
More William Golding Quotes
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I began to write when I was seven, and I have been writing off and on ever since. It is still off and on. You can say that when I am on, when I know I have a book which I am going to write, then I write two thousand words a day. That’s so many pages longhand.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
There’s a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.
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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.
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We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.
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There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Beethoven for listening; Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven for playing as well as Bach and Prokofiev and so on. If I kept going, this list would spiral. It’s as wide as literature; in fact, it is probably wider.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I’m scared of him,” said Piggy, “and that’s why I know him. If you’re scared of someone you hate him but you can’t stop thinking about him. You kid yourself he’s all right really, an’ then when you see him again; it’s like asthma an’ you can’t breathe.
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I 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.
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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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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 -
Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!
WILLIAM GOLDING -
How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?
WILLIAM GOLDING -
To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be
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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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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