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This is our island. It's a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we'll have fun.
William Golding -
But forgiveness must not only be given but received also.
William Golding
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A crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in their beliefs. Man is a gregarious animal, and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way on the side of a hill.
William Golding -
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 Golding -
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 -
We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?
William Golding -
His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.
William Golding -
My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
William Golding
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He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.
William Golding -
Percival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.
William Golding -
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.
William Golding -
For a small island [Great Britain], the place is remarkably diverse.
William Golding -
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 -
However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
William Golding
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The thing is - fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.
William Golding -
Honestly, I haven't the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.
William Golding -
As far as the novel is concerned in my own country, I think it's in a pretty healthy state.
William Golding -
Marx, 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.
William Golding -
The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.
William Golding -
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 Golding
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Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!
William Golding -
I think there might even come a time when I would read Virgil again. Ovid's Metamorphoses, perhaps, not because the music goes round and round and never comes out, but because it's an extraordinary picture of ceaseless change that never comes to an end.
William Golding -
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 Golding -
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.
William Golding