William Golding Quotes
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There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.
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Worse than madness. Sanity.
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Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.
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The mask was a thing on it's own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.
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Childhood is a disease - a sickness that you grow out of.
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The greatest ideas are the simplest.
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The man who tells the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature, dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is nothing like the truth.
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Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.
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Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.
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Percival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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One thing should be put firmly. Where people have commented on that novel [The Paper Men], they generally criticize the poor academic, Rick L. Tucker, who is savaged by the author, Wilfred Barclay. I don't think people have noticed that I have been far ruder about Barclay than I have been about Tucker. Tucker is a fool, but Barclay is a swine. The author really gets his come-uppance.
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Couldn't a fire outrun a galloping horse?
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Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars.
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The thing is - fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.
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A crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in their beliefs. Man is a gregarious animal, and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way on the side of a hill.
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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.
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I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.
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We just got to go on, that's all. That's what grownups would do.
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The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.
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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.
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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.
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I'm not a critic so much of my own writing. People must make up their own minds over that.
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Philosophy and Religion-what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?
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Honestly, I haven't the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.
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Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against this as a method, but it is not what English writers do.
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Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood.
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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.
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