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I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.

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
People
Ideas
Therefore
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Taking
Take
Novel
Important
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Novels
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Twice
Think
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Thinking
Read
Deeply
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More quotes by William Golding

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The thing is - fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.
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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Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind's essential illness.
William Golding
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Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?
William Golding
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Worse than madness. Sanity.
William Golding
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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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Childhood is a disease - a sickness that you grow out of.
William Golding
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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.
William Golding
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Then you have people coming up like Malcolm Bradbury, a relatively young writer who deals with the academic scene and deals with it, I think, brilliantly.
William Golding
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As far as the novel is concerned in my own country, I think it's in a pretty healthy state.
William Golding
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I don't think they [contemporary writers] read me either. I mean, if we're concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work.
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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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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Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.
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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Put simply the novel stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character. That is the service a novel renders.
William Golding
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I began to write when I was seven, and I have been writing off and on ever since. It is still off and on. You can say that when I am on, when I know I have a book which I am going to write, then I write two thousand words a day. That's so many pages longhand.
William Golding
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The greatest pleasure is not - say - sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity - well, that's the job of the writer.
William Golding
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You have the older generation like Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson who are not as old as Graham Greene, but still are coming on. I dare say anyone who knew the scene better than I know it could fill it in with a very satisfactory supply of novels.
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