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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.

William Golding

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William Golding
Age: 81 †
Born: 1911
Born: September 19
Died: 1993
Died: June 19
Novelist
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Newquay
Cornwall
William Gerald Albert Golding
Sir William Gerald Golding
Everything
Nationalism
Savages
Obey
English
Rules
Pride
Lord
Best
Piggy

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Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.
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Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
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I play the piano passionately and inaccurately. Indeed, I worked out the other day that of my seventy-five years I have spent at least one year sitting on a piano stool.
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I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.
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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.
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How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?
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Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
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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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I'm not a critic so much of my own writing. People must make up their own minds over that.
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Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.
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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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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.
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There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.
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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.
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I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.
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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.
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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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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.
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No human endeavour can ever be wholly good... it must always have a cost.
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I am here and here is nowhere in particular.
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