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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
Nature
Pessimist
Optimist
Conviction
Intellectual

More quotes by 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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People don't help 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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I am here and here is nowhere in particular.
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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Heaven lies around us in our infancy.
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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While I am on, I can discipline myself to that extent. When I am off, I can't discipline myself at all. On the other hand, when I am off, there are so many things I like doing, it doesn't really matter.
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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How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?
William Golding
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Worse than madness. Sanity.
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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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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Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars.
William Golding
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We just got to go on, that's all. That's what grownups would do.
William Golding
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I'm not a critic so much of my own writing. People must make up their own minds over that.
William Golding
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I mean, if we're concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work. I think this is very true of English writers, but perhaps not so true of French writers, who seem to read each other passionately, extensively, and endlessly, and who then talk about it to each other - which is splendid.
William Golding
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If I blow the conch and they don't come back then we've had it. We shan't keep the fire going. We'll be like animals. We'll never be rescued. If you don't blow, we'll soon be animals anyway.
William Golding
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I hope my books make statements about our general condition.
William Golding
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They accepted the pleasures of morning, the bright sun, the whelming sea and sweet air, as a time when play was good and life so full that hope was not necessary and therefore forgotten.
William Golding