William Golding Quotes

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.

He lost himself in a maze of thoughts that were rendered vague by his lack of words to express them. Frowning, he tried again.

Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.

Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!

They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.

This is our island. It's a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we'll have fun.

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.

Are we savages or what?

the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.

Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind's essential illness.

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.

The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers and won't tell.

The Navy's a very gentlemanly business. You fire at the horizon to sink a ship and then you pull people out of the water and say, 'Frightfully sorry, old chap.'

And I've been wearing specs since I was three.

Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood.

One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.

The candle-buds opened their wide white flowers....Their scent spilled out into the air and took possession of the island.

The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.

Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.

The rules!" shouted Ralph, "you're breaking the rules!" "Who cares?

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.

A star appeared...and was momentarily eclipsed by some movement.

The water rose further and dressed Simon's coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble.

They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.

There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.

As soon as Oliver Twist is serialized, people who would never dream of reading [Charles] Dickens, if they hadn't seen him on their box, buy the paperback.

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.

Heaven lies around us in our infancy.

I do think that art that doesn't communicate is useless.

You'll get back to where you came from.

Life's scientific, but we don't know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.

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.

Honestly, I haven't the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.

He doesn't mind if he dies... indeed, he would like to die; but yet he fears to fall. He would welcome a long sleep; but not at the price of falling to it.

I play the piano passionately and inaccurately. Indeed, I worked out the other day that of my seventy-five years; I have spent at least one year sitting on a piano stool.

In India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so.

Percival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.

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.

People don't help much.

For a small island [Great Britain], the place is remarkably diverse.

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.

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.

What could be safer than the bus center with its lamps and wheels?

Couldn't a fire outrun a galloping horse?

I suppose I'd have to say that my favourite author is Homer. After Homer's Ilaid, I'd name The Odyssey, and then I'd mention a number of plays of Euripides.

As far as the novel is concerned in my own country, I think it's in a pretty healthy state.

Then you have people coming up like Malcolm Bradbury, a relatively young writer who deals with the academic scene and deals with it, I think, brilliantly.

I'm not a critic so much of my own writing. People must make up their own minds over that.