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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

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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
Book
Writing
Immediately
Wrote
Meant
Writer
Probably
Written
Forget

More quotes by 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.
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Percival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.
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There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.
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Are we savages or what?
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Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.
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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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If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?
William Golding
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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.
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There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.
William Golding
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I've come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.
William Golding
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I will tell you what man is. He is a freak, an ejected foetus robbed of his natural development, thrown out into the world with a naked covering of parchment, with too little room for his teeth and a soft bulging skull like a bubble. But nature stirs a pudding there.
William Golding
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Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.
William Golding
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The water rose further and dressed Simon's coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble.
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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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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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However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
William Golding
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I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.
William Golding
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The rules! shouted Ralph, you're breaking the rules! Who cares?
William Golding
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Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood.
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