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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
Savages
Obey
English
Rules
Pride
Lord
Best
Piggy
Everything
Nationalism
More quotes by William Golding
If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?
William Golding
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
We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.
William Golding
The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.
William Golding
I will tell you what man is. He is a freak, an ejected foetus robbed of his natural development, thrown out into the world with a naked covering of parchment, with too little room for his teeth and a soft bulging skull like a bubble. But nature stirs a pudding there.
William Golding
He became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things. He talked to them, urging them, ordering them. Driven back by the tide, his footprints became bays in which they were trapped and gave him the illusion of mastery.
William Golding
I'm scared of him, said Piggy, and that's why I know him. If you're scared of someone you hate him but you can't stop thinking about him. You kid yourself he's all right really, an' then when you see him again it's like asthma an' you can't breathe.
William Golding
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.
William Golding
As far as the novel is concerned in my own country, I think it's in a pretty healthy state.
William Golding
What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
William Golding
Maybe, he said hesitantly, maybe there is a beast. The assembly cried out savagely and Ralph stood up in amazement. You, Simon? You believe in this? I don't know, said Simon. His heartbeats were choking him. [...] Ralph shouted. Hear him! He's got the conch! What I mean is . . . maybe it's only us. Nuts! That was from Piggy, shocked out of decorum.
William Golding
I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.
William Golding
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
As soon as Oliver Twist is serialized, people who would never dream of reading [Charles] Dickens, if they hadn't seen him on their box, buy the paperback.
William Golding
Of the authors writing in English, I'd mention Shakespeare and Milton. But all this is terribly high-hat and makes me sound very po-faced, I'm afraid however, I just happen to like these enormous, swinging, great creatures.
William Golding
I know there isn't no beast—not with claws and all that, I mean—but I know there isn't no fear, either. Piggy paused. Unless— Ralph moved restlessly. Unless what? Unless we get frightened of people.
William Golding
I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.
William Golding
My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
William Golding
I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.
William Golding
Couldn't a fire outrun a galloping horse?
William Golding
