William Golding Quotes
-
What could be safer than the bus center with its lamps and wheels?
-
I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.
-
The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.
-
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.
-
The greatest ideas are the simplest.
-
Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply. We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?
-
There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.
-
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against this as a method, but it is not what English writers do.
-
Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
-
I have a confession to make. The love affair of my life has been with the Greek language. I have now reached the age when it has occurred to me that I may have read some books for the last time. I suddenly thought that there are books I cannot bear not to read again before I die. One that stands out a mile is Homer's Iliad.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
-
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.
-
Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to be an autobiography. That's what you could say about it.
-
Life's scientific, but we don't know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.
-
Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.
-
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.
-
The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.
-
Honestly, I haven't the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.
-
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
-
Before the Second World War I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society. .... but after the war I did not because I was unable to. I had discovered what one man could do to another... I must say that 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...
-
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.