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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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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
Animal
Keep
Shan
Back
Rescued
Come
Anyway
Going
Blow
Never
Animals
Like
Soon
Fire

More quotes by William Golding

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I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.
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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.
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There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.
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I am here and here is nowhere in particular.
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There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.
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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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Graham Greene at 82 years old was still writing, and I don't think anyone can deny the force, the expertise, and the unique quality of his writing, if you take his complete oeuvre.
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We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.
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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.
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Worse than madness. Sanity.
William Golding
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At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.
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A crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in their beliefs. Man is a gregarious animal, and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way on the side of a hill.
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They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.
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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In India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so.
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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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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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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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.
William Golding
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One's intelligence may march about and about a problem, but the solution does not come gradually into view. One moment it is not. The next it is there.
William Golding