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I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.

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
Pessimist
Optimist
Conviction
Intellectual
Nature

More quotes by William Golding

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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
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Couldn't a fire outrun a galloping horse?
William Golding
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He doesn't mind if he dies... indeed, he would like to die but yet he fears to fall. He would welcome a long sleep but not at the price of falling to it.
William Golding
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I do think that art that doesn't communicate is useless.
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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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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There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.
William Golding
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I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.
William Golding
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How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?
William Golding
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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
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What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?
William Golding
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Honestly, I haven't the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.
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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I hope my books make statements about our general condition.
William Golding
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Heaven lies around us in our infancy.
William Golding
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the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.
William Golding
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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
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Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!
William Golding
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I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.
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