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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

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A star appeared...and was momentarily eclipsed by some movement.
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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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My father was very musical, and music plays quite a large part in my life.
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?
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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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Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don't understand.
William Golding
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I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.
William Golding
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If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?
William Golding
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Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.
William Golding
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There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.
William Golding
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They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.
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I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.
William Golding
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Which is better--to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?
William Golding
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I play the piano passionately and inaccurately. Indeed, I worked out the other day that of my seventy-five years I have spent at least one year sitting on a piano stool.
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I suppose drama can either take the place of a novel or can be very closely allied with it. It's quite customary to turn a successful novel into a film or a television series because you can dramatize and pictorialize a novel.
William Golding
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We're not savages. We're English.
William Golding
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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.
William Golding
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Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
William Golding
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His mind was crowded with memories memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.
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