Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Ships
Frightfully
Pull
Gentlemanly
Sorry
Chap
Fire
Chaps
Water
Navy
Business
Sink
People
Ship
Horizon
More quotes by William Golding
This is our island. It's a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we'll have fun.
William Golding
We're not savages. We're English.
William Golding
I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.
William Golding
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
Which is better--to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?
William Golding
We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.
William Golding
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
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
I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.
William Golding
Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.
William Golding
And I've been wearing specs since I was three.
William Golding
The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers and won't tell.
William Golding
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.
William Golding
Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.
William Golding
He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.
William Golding
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
I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.
William Golding
Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.
William Golding
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
What could be safer than the bus center with its lamps and wheels?
William Golding