William Golding Quotes
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You'll get back to where you came from.
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There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.
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The greatest ideas are the simplest.
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The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.
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I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.
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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.
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I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.
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Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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What kind of human person has a favorite eraser?
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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...
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The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.
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Maybe half a dozen think they are a community, but, in general terms, I think English writers tend to face outwards, away from each other, and write in their own patch, as it were.
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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.
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Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against this as a method, but it is not what English writers do.
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Honestly, I haven't the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.
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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.
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Life's scientific, but we don't know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.
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However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
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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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Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.