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

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

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I do think that art that doesn't communicate is useless.
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I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.
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The mask was a thing on it's own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.
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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.
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We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.
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Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!
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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.
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I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.
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I am here and here is nowhere in particular.
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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.
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The man who tells the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature, dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is nothing like the truth.
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Maybe, he said hesitantly, maybe there is a beast. The assembly cried out savagely and Ralph stood up in amazement. You, Simon? You believe in this? I don't know, said Simon. His heartbeats were choking him. [...] Ralph shouted. Hear him! He's got the conch! What I mean is . . . maybe it's only us. Nuts! That was from Piggy, shocked out of decorum.
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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.
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Are we savages or what?
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Together, joined in effort by the burden, they staggered up the last steep of the mountain. Together, they chanted One! Two! Three! and crashed the log on to the great pile. Then they stepped back, laughing with triumphant pleasure.
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I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.
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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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Honestly, I haven't the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.
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Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!
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My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
William Golding