Top 100 William Golding Quotes
#1. 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.
William Golding
#2. The mask was a thing on it's own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.
William Golding
#3. 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
#4. It was, perhaps, no situation from which to face a charging badger.
William Golding
#6. There is nothing in it of course. Just a feeling. But you can feel as if you're not hunting, but - being hunted, as if something's behind you all the time in the jungle.
William Golding
#7. 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.
William Golding
#8. Jack looked around for understanding, but found only respect.
William Golding
#9. The thing is
fear can't hold you any more than a dream ...
William Golding
#10. He wanted to explain how people were never quite what you thought they were.
William Golding
#13. 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.
William Golding
#15. Lok was running as fast as he could. His head was down and he carried his thorn bush horizontally for balance and smacked the drifts of vivid buds aside with his free hand.
William Golding
#16. 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?
William Golding
#17. The three boys stood in the darkness, striving unsuccessfully to convey the majesty of adult life
William Golding
#18. Of the authors writing in English, I'd mention Shakespeare and Milton. But all this is terribly high-hat and makes me sound very po-faced, I'm afraid; however, I just happen to like these enormous, swinging, great creatures.
William Golding
#20. He walked slowly into the middle of the clearing and looked steadily at the skull that gleamed as white as ever the conch had done and seemed to jeer at him cynically An inquisitive ant was busy in one of the eye sockets but otherwise the thing was lifeless. Or was it?
William Golding
#22. The sting of ashes in his eyes, tiredness, fear, enraged him.
William Golding
#23. The crying went on, breath after breath, and seemed to sustain him upright as if he were nailed to it.
William Golding
#24. His manual of heaven and hell lay open before me, and I could perceive my nothingness in this scheme.
William Golding
#26. I'm frightend. Of us. I want to go home. O God I to go home." "It's was an accident," said Piggy stubbornly,"and that's that." He touched Ralph's bare shoulder and Ralph shuddered at the human contact.
William Golding
#27. There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.
William Golding
#28. I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.
William Golding
#29. What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
William Golding
#30. The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.
William Golding
#31. The best novels, the writer's imagination becomes the reader's reality.
William Golding
#33. We need an assembly, not for cleverness, but for setting things straight.
William Golding
#35. But nobody else understands about the fire. If someone threw you a rope when you were drowning. If a doctor said take this because if you don't take you'll die - you would, wouldn't you?
William Golding
#37. If you don't change your hairstyle because it's mostly fallen out and you don't shave, you've no cause to go chasing yourself in a mirror.
William Golding
#38. 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.
William Golding
#39. As far as the novel is concerned in my own country, I think it's in a pretty healthy state.
William Golding
#40. The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.
William Golding
#42. They were black and iridescent green and without number; and in front of Simon, the Lord of the Flies hung on his stick and grinned.
William Golding
#45. 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.
William Golding
#46. He tried to convey the compulsion to track down and kill that was swallowing him up.
William Golding
#47. Roger edged past the chief, only just avoiding pushing him with his shoulder. The yelling ceased, and Samneric lay looking up in quiet terror. Roger advanced upon them as one wielding a nameless authority.
William Golding
#49. Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against this as a method, but it is not what English writers do.
William Golding
#51. 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.
William Golding
#52. Then, amid the roar of bees in the afternoon sunlight, Simon found for the fruit they could not reach ... passed them back down to the endless, outstretched hands.
William Golding
#53. Together, joined in effort by the burden, they staggered up the last steep of the mountain. Together, they chanted One! Two! Three! and crashed the log on to the great pile. Then they stepped back, laughing with triumphant pleasure ...
William Golding
#54. Beethoven for listening; Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven for playing as well as Bach and Prokofiev and so on. If I kept going, this list would spiral. It's as wide as literature; in fact, it is probably wider.
William Golding
#55. They would reach the castle some time; and the chief would have to go forward.
William Golding
#56. The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.
William Golding
#57. He knelt among the shadows and felt his isolation bitterly. They were savages it was true; but they were human.
William Golding
#58. The rules!" shouted Ralph, "you're breaking the rules!"
"Who cares?
William Golding
#59. They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.
William Golding
#60. Perhaps the various burnings of the Alexandria Library were necessary, like those Australian Forest Fires without which the new seeds cannot burst their shells and make a young, healthy forest.
William Golding
#61. I must say that anyone who passed through those years [of World War II] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.
William Golding
#62. What's in a book, is not what an author thought he put into it, it's what the reader get out of it.
William Golding
#63. Which is better
to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?
William Golding
#64. Fat lot of good we are," said Ralph. "Three blind mice.
William Golding
#66. This day promised, like the others, to be a sunbath under a blue dome.
William Golding
#67. I cried out not with hope of an ear but as accepting a shut door, darkness and a shut sky.
William Golding
#68. I'm not a critic so much of my own writing. People must make up their own minds over that.
William Golding
#69. 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.
William Golding
#70. I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.
William Golding
#71. The pause was only long enough for them to understand what an enormity the downward stroke would be.
William Golding
#72. 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.
William Golding
#73. 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.
William Golding
#75. Life's scientific, but we don't know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.
William Golding
#76. 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.
William Golding
#77. Piggy once more was the centre of social derision so that everyone felt cheerful and normal.
William Golding
#78. The two boys faced each other. There was the brilliant world of hunting, tactics, fierce exhilaration, skill; and there was the world of longing and baffled common-sense.
William Golding
#79. Of course we're frightened sometimes but we put up with being frightened.
William Golding
#80. Which is better
to be a pack of painted niggers like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is
William Golding
#81. 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.
William Golding
#82. 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.
William Golding
#83. A battle cheapens life and I find life cheap enough already
William Golding
#84. 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.
William Golding
#85. There ought to be some mode of life where all love is good, where one love can't compete with another but adds to it.
William Golding
#87. He forgot his wounds, his hunger and thirst, and became fear; hopeless fear
William Golding
#89. Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.
William Golding
#91. I got this to say. you are acting like a crowd of kids.
William Golding
#92. 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
#93. [F]ear can't hurt you any more than a dream. There aren't any beasts to be afraid of on this island ... Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!
William Golding
#94. 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
William Golding
#95. Honestly, I haven't the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.
William Golding
#96. The whole book is posing a question. You think you've won a war - what you've done is finish a war. There was a crime committed in that war the like of which perhaps was never committed in human history. You think about it.
William Golding
#97. I was an estructuralist at the age of seven, which is about the right age for it.
William Golding
#98. Which is better - to have rules and agree or to hunt and kill? ... law and rescue or hunting and breaking things up?
William Golding
#99. 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
#100. 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.
William Golding
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