I really feel the novel has certain conveniences about it and has something so fundamental about it you could almost say that as long as there is paper, there is going to be the 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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However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
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If faces were different when lit from above or below — what was a face? What was anything?
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I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.
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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.
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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.
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We’re not savages. We’re English.
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What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?
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My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
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How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?
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Are we savages or what?
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This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we’ll have fun.
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And I’ve been wearing specs since I was three.
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Childhood is a disease – a sickness that you grow out of.
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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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Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.
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The rules!” shouted Ralph, “you’re breaking the rules!” “Who cares?
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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.
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People don’t help much.
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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.
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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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Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
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the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.
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Philosophy and Religion-what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?
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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.
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The candle-buds opened their wide white flowers….Their scent spilled out into the air and took possession of the island.
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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.
WILLIAM GOLDING