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We're not savages. We're English.

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
English

More quotes by William Golding

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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
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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
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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.
William Golding
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At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.
William Golding
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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
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Together, joined in effort by the burden, they staggered up the last steep of the mountain. Together, they chanted One! Two! Three! and crashed the log on to the great pile. Then they stepped back, laughing with triumphant pleasure.
William Golding
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What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
William Golding
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I've come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.
William Golding
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Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood.
William Golding
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Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind's essential illness.
William Golding
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If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?
William Golding
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There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.
William Golding
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However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
William Golding
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Couldn't a fire outrun a galloping horse?
William Golding
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What could be safer than the bus center with its lamps and wheels?
William Golding
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Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to be an autobiography. That's what you could say about it.
William Golding
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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
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Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.
William Golding
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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.
William Golding
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For a small island [Great Britain], the place is remarkably diverse.
William Golding