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Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don't understand.

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
Laughter
Language
Understand
Nothing
Impenetrable

More quotes by 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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The thing is - fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.
William Golding
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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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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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Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.
William Golding
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I know there isn't no beast—not with claws and all that, I mean—but I know there isn't no fear, either. Piggy paused. Unless— Ralph moved restlessly. Unless what? Unless we get frightened of people.
William Golding
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Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
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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The beast was harmless and horrible and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.
William Golding
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Worse than madness. Sanity.
William Golding
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I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.
William Golding
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the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.
William Golding
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It may be -- I hope it is -- redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable.
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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He lost himself in a maze of thoughts that were rendered vague by his lack of words to express them. Frowning, he tried again.
William Golding
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One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.
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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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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You'll get back to where you came from.
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