William Golding Quotes

I don't like the word 'allegorical', I don't like the word 'symbolic' - the word I really like is 'mythic', and people always think that means 'full of lies', whereas of course what it really means is 'full of truth which cannot be told in any other way but a story'.

1442

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.

1639

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.

4629

The greatest ideas are the simplest.

2440

It's simpler to believe in a miracle.

1994

Life […] is scientific, that’s what it is.

2766

I got this to say. You're acting like a crowd of kids.

2434

If only one had time to think!

1388

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.

4078

We need an assembly, not for cleverness, but for setting things straight.

3676

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

4152

Out of the firelight everything was black and silver, black island, rocks and trees carved cleanly out of the sky and silver river with a flashing light rippling back and forth along the lip of the fall.

4487

I've always been puzzled, and am still at this moment in a state of confusion, between the imaginative world and the real world. It is perfectly true to say that I have at some times in my life found that the imaginative world had pushed the real world right out of the way, and was literally more real.

1486

If you accept life dully, you can go through it moving not among things but among words.

4588

Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.

2642

History is the nothing people write about a nothing.

3440

We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.

1292

With lack of sleep and too much understanding I grow a little crazy, I think, like all men at sea who live too close to each other and too close thereby to all that is monstrous under the sun and moon.

1342

I must say that 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. They were done, skilfully, coldly, by educated men, doctors, lawyers, by men with a tradition of civilization behind them, to beings of their own kind....

3047

We have to face it at last. We're not all human.

3555

His manual of heaven and hell lay open before me, and I could perceive my nothingness in this scheme.

2312

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.

2660

No human endeavour can ever be wholly good... it must always have a cost.

4341

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.

1865

He wanted to explain how people were never quite what you thought they were.

3375

I came to see you two-" Words could not express the dull pain of these things.

1260

I tell you, money can't build your spire for you. Build it of gold and it would simply sink deeper.

4374

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.

2683

We think we know."
"Know? That's worse than an atom bomb, and always was.

4928

I'm warning you. I'm going to get waxy. D'you see? You're not wanted. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island! So don't try it on, my poor misguided boy, or else-" Simon found he was looking into a vast mouth. There was blackness within, a blackness that spread.

4310

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.

4926

I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.

1472