Quote

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

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
Pull
Gentlemanly
Sorry
Chap
Fire
Chaps
Water
Navy
Business
Sink
People
Ship
Horizon
Ships
Frightfully

More quotes by William Golding

Image
He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.
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
For a small island [Great Britain], the place is remarkably diverse.
William Golding
Image
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.
William Golding
Image
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
Image
We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?
William Golding
Image
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
Image
The novel is very much alive, indeed. In Toronto at the Sixth Annual International Festival of Authors (October 1985) I listened to novelists by the dozen.
William Golding
Image
Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.
William Golding
Image
I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.
William Golding
Image
An orotundity, which I define as Nobelitis a pomposity in which one is treated as representative of more than oneself by someone conscious of representing more than himself.
William Golding
Image
Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.
William Golding
Image
We're not savages. We're English.
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
Image
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
Image
Ralph... would treat the day's decisions as though he were playing chess. The only trouble was that he would never be a very good chess player.
William Golding
Image
He doesn't mind if he dies... indeed, he would like to die but yet he fears to fall. He would welcome a long sleep but not at the price of falling to it.
William Golding
Image
Percival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.
William Golding
Image
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
Image
How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?
William Golding