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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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The Navy's a very gentlemanly business. You fire at the horizon to sink a ship and then you pull people out of the water and say, 'Frightfully sorry, old chap.'
William Golding
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However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
William Golding
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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
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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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For a small island, the place is remarkably diverse. Writers tend to see things from their own points of view, looking in one direction very much.
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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They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.
William Golding
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I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.
William Golding
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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
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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
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They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.
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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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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Are we savages or what?
William Golding
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I have a confession to make. The love affair of my life has been with the Greek language. I have now reached the age when it has occurred to me that I may have read some books for the last time. I suddenly thought that there are books I cannot bear not to read again before I die. One that stands out a mile is Homer's Iliad.
William Golding
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We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?
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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Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.
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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He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.
William Golding