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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
Pride
Lord
Best
Piggy
Everything
Nationalism
Savages
Obey
English
Rules

More quotes by William Golding

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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.
William Golding
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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
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Percival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.
William Golding
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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.
William Golding
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And I've been wearing specs since I was three.
William Golding
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There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.
William Golding
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We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?
William Golding
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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.
William Golding
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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.
William Golding
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How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?
William Golding
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One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.
William Golding
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Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.
William Golding
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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
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You'll get back to where you came from.
William Golding
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Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!
William Golding
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Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.
William Golding
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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.
William Golding
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People don't help much.
William Golding
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Maybe half a dozen think they are a community, but, in general terms, I think English writers tend to face outwards, away from each other, and write in their own patch, as it were.
William Golding
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My father was very musical, and music plays quite a large part in my life.
William Golding