William Golding Quotes
-
Childhood is a disease - a sickness that you grow out of.
-
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.
-
One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.
-
What kind of human person has a favorite eraser?
-
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.
-
I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.
-
Couldn't a fire outrun a galloping horse?
-
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.
-
I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.
-
Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.
-
Are we savages or what?
-
It is at least scientifically respectable to postulate that at the centre of a black hole the laws of nature no longer apply. Since most scientists are just a bit religious and most religious are seldom wholly unscientific we find humanity in a comical position. His scientific intellect believes in the possibility of miracles inside a black hole while his religious intellect believes in them outside it.
-
I'm not a critic so much of my own writing. People must make up their own minds over that.
-
He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life,where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.
-
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.
-
I suppose drama can either take the place of a novel or can be very closely allied with it. It's quite customary to turn a successful novel into a film or a television series because you can dramatize and pictorialize a novel.
-
Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
-
I will tell you what man is. He is a freak, an ejected foetus robbed of his natural development, thrown out into the world with a naked covering of parchment, with too little room for his teeth and a soft bulging skull like a bubble. But nature stirs a pudding there.
-
Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!
-
The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.
-
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.
-
Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.
-
There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.
-
Worse than madness. Sanity.