William Golding Quotes

I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.

We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.

I began to see what people were capable of doing. 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.

We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.

I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.

The thing is - fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.

I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.

I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.

The greatest ideas are the simplest.

What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.

No human endeavour can ever be wholly good... it must always have a cost.

Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.

We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.

Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.

He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.

Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars.

The mask was a thing on it's own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.

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.

I hope my books make statements about our general condition.

However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.

We're not savages. We're English.

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.

If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?

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.

How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?

Worse than madness. Sanity.

We just got to go on, that's all. That's what grownups would do.

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.

Which is better--to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?

Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.

Childhood is a disease - a sickness that you grow out of.

I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?

Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.

What kind of human person has a favorite eraser?

Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.

Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don't understand.

Graham Greene at 82 years old was still writing, and I don't think anyone can deny the force, the expertise, and the unique quality of his writing, if you take his complete oeuvre.

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.

The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.

There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.

I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.

We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?

But forgiveness must not only be given but received also.

Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!

How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?

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.