Quote

A crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in their beliefs. Man is a gregarious animal, and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way on the side of a hill.

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
Agreement
Grade
Graze
Men
Animal
Hills
Pointing
Gregarious
Belief
Beliefs
Warming
Thinkers
Enjoy
Crowds
Cows
Enjoys
Three
Prejudice
Thinker
Contradictions
Thank
Grades
Shouting
Hands
Side
Contradiction
Prejudices
Thing
Sides
Crowd
Hill
Way

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What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?
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I hope my books make statements about our general condition.
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How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?
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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.
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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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We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.
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The candle-buds opened their wide white flowers....Their scent spilled out into the air and took possession of the island.
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The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.
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One's intelligence may march about and about a problem, but the solution does not come gradually into view. One moment it is not. The next it is there.
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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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One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.
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Couldn't a fire outrun a galloping horse?
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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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What kind of human person has a favorite eraser?
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the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.
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I suppose drama can either take the place of a novel or can be very closely allied with it. It's quite customary to turn a successful novel into a film or a television series because you can dramatize and pictorialize a novel.
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He became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things. He talked to them, urging them, ordering them. Driven back by the tide, his footprints became bays in which they were trapped and gave him the illusion of mastery.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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