Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Obey
English
Rules
Pride
Lord
Best
Piggy
Everything
Nationalism
Savages

More quotes by William Golding

Image
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
Image
I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.
William Golding
Image
What could be safer than the bus center with its lamps and wheels?
William Golding
Image
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
Image
Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars.
William Golding
Image
As far as the novel is concerned in my own country, I think it's in a pretty healthy state.
William Golding
Image
You have the older generation like Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson who are not as old as Graham Greene, but still are coming on. I dare say anyone who knew the scene better than I know it could fill it in with a very satisfactory supply of novels.
William Golding
Image
To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be
William Golding
Image
Are we savages or what?
William Golding
Image
I hope my books make statements about our general condition.
William Golding
Image
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
Image
I'm not a critic so much of my own writing. People must make up their own minds over that.
William Golding
Image
Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don't understand.
William Golding
Image
Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
William Golding
Image
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
Image
I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.
William Golding
Image
Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.
William Golding
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.
William Golding