William Golding Quotes
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For a small island, the place is remarkably diverse. Writers tend to see things from their own points of view, looking in one direction very much.
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We just got to go on, that's all. That's what grownups would do.
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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.
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How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?
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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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I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.
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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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I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.
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However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
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Biography always has fulfiled this role. Robinson Crusoe is a biography, as is Tom Jones. You can go through the whole range of the novel, and you will find it is biography. The only difference between one example and the other is that sometimes it's a partial biography and sometimes it's a total biography. Clarissa, for example, is a partial biography of Clarissa and a partial biography of Lovelace. In other words, it doesn't follow Lovelace from when he is in the cradle, though it takes him to the grave.
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Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.
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They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.
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Couldn't a fire outrun a galloping horse?
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I wouldn't have thought that the techniques of story-telling, which is what the novel is after all, can vary much because there are two things involved.There's a story and there's a listener, whose attention you have to keep. Now the only way in which you can keep a reader's attention to a story is in his wanting to know what is going to happen next. This puts a fairly close restriction on the method you must use.
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Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars.
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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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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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Roger stooped, picked up a stone, aimed and threw it at Henry-threw it to miss. The stone, that token of preposterous time, bounced five yards to Henry's right and fell in the water. Roger gathered a handful of stones and began to throw them. Yet there was a space round Henry, perhaps six yards in diameter, into which he dare not throw. Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law. Roger was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins.
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Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.
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One's intelligence may march about and about a problem, but the solution does not come gradually into view. One moment it is not. The next it is there.
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I'm not a critic so much of my own writing. People must make up their own minds over that.
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Are we savages or what?
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One thing should be put firmly. Where people have commented on that novel [The Paper Men], they generally criticize the poor academic, Rick L. Tucker, who is savaged by the author, Wilfred Barclay. I don't think people have noticed that I have been far ruder about Barclay than I have been about Tucker. Tucker is a fool, but Barclay is a swine. The author really gets his come-uppance.
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Life's scientific, but we don't know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.