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Worse than madness. Sanity.
William Golding -
Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
William Golding
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There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.
William Golding -
Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.
William Golding -
You have the older generation like Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson who are not as old as Graham Greene, but still are coming on. I dare say anyone who knew the scene better than I know it could fill it in with a very satisfactory supply of novels.
William Golding -
Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.
William Golding -
There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.
William Golding -
I mean, if we're concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work. I think this is very true of English writers, but perhaps not so true of French writers, who seem to read each other passionately, extensively, and endlessly, and who then talk about it to each other - which is splendid.
William Golding
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Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.
William Golding -
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.
William Golding -
And I've been wearing specs since I was three.
William Golding -
I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.
William Golding -
I do think that art that doesn't communicate is useless.
William Golding -
If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?
William Golding
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The candle-buds opened their wide white flowers....Their scent spilled out into the air and took possession of the island.
William Golding -
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.
William Golding -
At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.
William Golding -
The man who tells the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature, dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is nothing like the truth.
William Golding -
When you take a child who's hollering like hell, sit him on your knee, and say "once upon a time", you stop him hollering. As long as you go on telling him a story, he will listen. Novelists who neglect this fundamental effect do so at their peril. They become what is known as the experimental novelist, and an experimental novel is not really a novel at all.
William Golding -
Put simply the novel stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character. That is the service a novel renders.
William Golding
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People don't help much.
William Golding -
It wasn't until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's, and then everything followed from there.
William Golding -
A star appeared...and was momentarily eclipsed by some movement.
William Golding -
The rules!" shouted Ralph, "you're breaking the rules!" "Who cares?
William Golding