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The novel is very much alive, indeed. In Toronto at the Sixth Annual International Festival of Authors (October 1985) I listened to novelists by the dozen.
William Golding -
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
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I hope my books make statements about our general condition.
William Golding -
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...
William Golding -
We just got to go on, that's all. That's what grownups would do.
William Golding -
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.
William Golding -
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.
William Golding -
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.
William Golding
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The greatest ideas are the simplest.
William Golding -
One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.
William Golding -
I'm not a critic so much of my own writing. People must make up their own minds over that.
William Golding -
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.
William Golding -
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against this as a method, but it is not what English writers do.
William Golding -
the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.
William Golding
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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.
William Golding -
Ralph... would treat the day's decisions as though he were playing chess. The only trouble was that he would never be a very good chess player.
William Golding -
They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.
William Golding -
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.
William Golding -
How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?
William Golding -
The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.
William Golding
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My father was very musical, and music plays quite a large part in my life.
William Golding -
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.
William Golding -
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.
William Golding -
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.
William Golding