Quote

Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.

William Golding

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Daily
Part
Sing
Writing
Bird
Much
Level
Carpentry
Levels
Novelists
Jobs
Routine
Write
Birds
Stuff
Push

More quotes by William Golding

Image
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
Image
I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.
William Golding
Image
As far as the novel is concerned in my own country, I think it's in a pretty healthy state.
William Golding
Image
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
Image
He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life,where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.
William Golding
Image
However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
William Golding
Image
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
Image
My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
William Golding
Image
For a small island, the place is remarkably diverse. Writers tend to see things from their own points of view, looking in one direction very much.
William Golding
Image
The Navy's a very gentlemanly business. You fire at the horizon to sink a ship and then you pull people out of the water and say, 'Frightfully sorry, old chap.'
William Golding
Image
Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.
William Golding
Image
The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.
William Golding
Image
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
Image
Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
William Golding
Image
I'm scared of him, said Piggy, and that's why I know him. If you're scared of someone you hate him but you can't stop thinking about him. You kid yourself he's all right really, an' then when you see him again it's like asthma an' you can't breathe.
William Golding
Image
This is our island. It's a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we'll have fun.
William Golding
Image
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
Image
And I've been wearing specs since I was three.
William Golding
Image
They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.
William Golding
Image
I really feel the novel has certain conveniences about it and has something so fundamental about it you could almost say that as long as there is paper, there is going to be the novel.
William Golding