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What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

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
Humans
Savages
Animals
Animal

More quotes by William Golding

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My father was very musical, and music plays quite a large part in my life.
William Golding
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Maybe half a dozen think they are a community, but, in general terms, I think English writers tend to face outwards, away from each other, and write in their own patch, as it were.
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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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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They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.
William Golding
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Beethoven for listening Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven for playing as well as Bach and Prokofiev and so on. If I kept going, this list would spiral. It's as wide as literature in fact, it is probably wider.
William Golding
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This is our island. It's a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we'll have fun.
William Golding
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Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!
William Golding
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Of the authors writing in English, I'd mention Shakespeare and Milton. But all this is terribly high-hat and makes me sound very po-faced, I'm afraid however, I just happen to like these enormous, swinging, great creatures.
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 rules! shouted Ralph, you're breaking the rules! Who cares?
William Golding
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What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
William Golding
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However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
William Golding
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An orotundity, which I define as Nobelitis a pomposity in which one is treated as representative of more than oneself by someone conscious of representing more than himself.
William Golding
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Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against this as a method, but it is not what English writers do.
William Golding
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He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.
William Golding
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Heaven lies around us in our infancy.
William Golding
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It may be -- I hope it is -- redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable.
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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I am here and here is nowhere in particular.
William Golding