Top 100 William Golding's Quotes
#1. Ideas for my first experiments in human aggression came from discussions we had in a research seminar about William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies.'
Philip Zimbardo
#2. As far as the novel is concerned in my own country, I think it's in a pretty healthy state.
William Golding
#3. 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
#4. 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.
William Golding
#5. 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
#6. Maybe," he said hesitantly, "maybe there is a beast." [ ... ] "What I mean is, maybe it's only us.
William Golding
#7. 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.'
William Golding
#8. So the last part, the bit we can all talk about, is kind of deciding on the fear.
We've got to talk about this fear and decide there's nothing in it.
William Golding
#10. A single drop of water that had escaped Piggy's fingers now flashed on the delicate curve like a star.
William Golding
#11. The best novels, the writer's imagination becomes the reader's reality.
William Golding
#12. What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
William Golding
#13. The greatest pleasure is not - say - sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity - well, that's the job of the writer.
William Golding
#14. They knew very well why he hadn't: because of the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh; because of the unbearable blood
William Golding
#15. I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.
William Golding
#16. There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.
William Golding
#17. 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
#18. This was a savage whose image refused to blend with that ancient picture of a boy in shorts and a shirt.
William Golding
#20. Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.
William Golding
#21. His manual of heaven and hell lay open before me, and I could perceive my nothingness in this scheme.
William Golding
#22. The crying went on, breath after breath, and seemed to sustain him upright as if he were nailed to it.
William Golding
#23. The sting of ashes in his eyes, tiredness, fear, enraged him.
William Golding
#25. 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.
William Golding
#26. 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.
William Golding
#27. 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
#28. Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law. Roger's arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins. Henry
William Golding
#29. The moon was through to the sunset side of the gap, but its light was hardly noticeable on the earth for the ruddy brilliance of the firelight.
William Golding
#30. 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.
William Golding
#32. 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
#33. I dunno, Ralph. We just got to go on, that's all. That's what grown-ups would do.
William Golding
#34. 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
#35. I'm scared of him," said Piggy, "and that's why I know him. If you're scared of someone you hate him but you can't stop thinking about him. You kid yourself he's all right really, an' then when you see him again; it's like asthma an' you can't breathe ...
William Golding
#37. Life's scientific, but we don't know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.
William Golding
#38. I think there might even come a time when I would read Virgil again. Ovid's Metamorphoses, perhaps, not because the music goes round and round and never comes out, but because it's an extraordinary picture of ceaseless change that never comes to an end.
William Golding
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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.
William Golding
#42. 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.
William Golding
#43. 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
#44. This is our island. It's a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we'll have fun.
William Golding
#45. Simon stayed where he was, a small brown image, concealed by the leaves.Even if he shut his eyes, the sow's head still remained like an after-image.The half-shut eyes were dim with the infinite cynicism of adult life. They assured Simon that everything was a bad business.
William Golding
#46. I wish my auntie was here."
"I wish my father.. O, what's the use?
William Golding
#47. Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind's essential illness.
William Golding
#49. 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
#50. 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 ...
William Golding
#51. There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.
William Golding
#52. The thing is
fear can't hold you any more than a dream ...
William Golding
#53. I cannot convince myself that my mental capacities are important enough to justify either the good or the harm they started.
William Golding
#55. However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
William Golding
#56. Other people could stand up and speak to an assembly, apparently, without that dreadful feeling of pressure of personality; could say what they would as though they were speaking to only one person
William Golding
#59. There isn't anyone to help you. Only me. And I'm the beast.
William Golding
#61. 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.
William Golding
#62. He wanted to explain how people were never quite what you thought they were.
William Golding
#63. I was the only boy in our school what had asthma," said the fat boy with a touch of pride. "And I've been wearing specs since I was three.
William Golding
#64. In our country for all her greatness there is one thing she cannot do and that is translate a person wholly out of one class into another. Perfect translation from one language into another is impossible. Class is the British language.
William Golding
#65. 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
#66. I think are foolish to pretend they are equal to men,they are far superior and always have been. -William Golding
William Golding
#67. Jack looked around for understanding, but found only respect.
William Golding
#69. 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
#70. 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
#72. It was, perhaps, no situation from which to face a charging badger.
William Golding
#73. We think we know."
"Know? That's worse than an atom bomb, and always was.
William Golding
#74. 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
#75. The mask was a thing on it's own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.
William Golding
#76. 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
#77. Piggy was a bore; his fat, his ass-mar and his matter-of-fact ideas were dull,
William Golding
#79. Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don't understand.
William Golding
#80. -I got the conch!" --Piggy (in Lord of the Flies), attempting Democracy
William Golding
#81. 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
#83. The three boys stood in the darkness, striving unsuccessfully to convey the majesty of adult life
William Golding
#84. Piggy took off his shoes and socks, ranged them carefully on the ledge and tested the water with one toe. 'It's hot!' 'What did you expect?' 'I didn't expect nothing. My auntie-' 'Sucks to your auntie!
William Golding
#85. He was so delighted he stood on his head. And this is one of the ways small boys show they're delighted, they stand on their head and waggle their feet in the air.
William Golding
#86. The conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.
William Golding
#87. What they might become in darkness nobody cared to think.
William Golding
#88. Percival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.
William Golding
#92. Who would sharpen a point aginst the darkness of the world?
William Golding
#93. Childhood is a disease - a sickness that you grow out of.
William Golding
#94. 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
#95. His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.
William Golding
#96. 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
#97. I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.
William Golding
#98. Yet I was wound up. I tick. I exist. I am poised eighteen inches over the black rivets you are reading, I am in your place, I am shut in a bone box and trying to fasten myself on the white paper. The rivets join us together and yet for all the passion we share nothing but our sense of division.
William Golding
#100. If faces were different when lit from above or below
what was a face? What was anything?
William Golding
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