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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
Optimist
Conviction
Intellectual
Nature
Pessimist

More quotes by William Golding

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What kind of human person has a favorite eraser?
William Golding
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And I've been wearing specs since I was three.
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The novel is very much alive, indeed. In Toronto at the Sixth Annual International Festival of Authors (October 1985) I listened to novelists by the dozen.
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Which is better -- to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is? Which is better -- to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill? Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
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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.
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What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
William Golding
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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
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Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!
William Golding
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I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.
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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Are we savages or what?
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The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.
William Golding
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However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
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We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?
William Golding
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Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind's essential illness.
William Golding
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Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
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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I hope my books make statements about our general condition.
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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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