William Golding Quotes

I have a confession to make. The love affair of my life has been with the Greek language. I have now reached the age when it has occurred to me that I may have read some books for the last time. I suddenly thought that there are books I cannot bear not to read again before I die. One that stands out a mile is Homer's Iliad.

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.

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.

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.

If I blow the conch and they don't come back; then we've had it. We shan't keep the fire going. We'll be like animals. We'll never be rescued." "If you don't blow, we'll soon be animals anyway.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Worse than madness. Sanity.

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

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

It may be -- I hope it is -- redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable.

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

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.

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.

But forgiveness must not only be given but received also.

He became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things. He talked to them, urging them, ordering them. Driven back by the tide, his footprints became bays in which they were trapped and gave him the illusion of mastery.

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.

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.

While I am on, I can discipline myself to that extent. When I am off, I can't discipline myself at all. On the other hand, when I am off, there are so many things I like doing, it doesn't really matter.

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

I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.

Heaven lies around us in our infancy.

To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be

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.

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

Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply. We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?

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?

You'll get back to where you came from.

Latin, as we all know, ultimately broke down into Spanish, Italian, French, and so on. One wonders whether there will be an imperial parallel with English breaking down into, shall we say, North American, European, Australian, and so on. On the other hand, there is this immense, inward-driving influence of radio and television that is bringing us all back together. One could say it's a fight between the two: a fight between regionalism and the standardization through communication.

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.

People don't help much.

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.

We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?

I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.

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.

Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say three things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. Most important of all, we know that if at any point between the beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does not get off the bicycle he will fall off it. That is a metaphor for the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of any society of living things.

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

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

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

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.

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

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