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While I am on, I can discipline myself to that extent. When I am off, I can't discipline myself at all. On the other hand, when I am off, there are so many things I like doing, it doesn't really matter.

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
Many
Really
Things
Extent
Like
Discipline
Hand
Doesn
Hands
Matter

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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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The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.
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The greatest ideas are the simplest.
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We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?
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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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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.
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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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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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If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?
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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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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.
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The beast was harmless and horrible and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.
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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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However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
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There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.
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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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Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
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I play the piano passionately and inaccurately. Indeed, I worked out the other day that of my seventy-five years I have spent at least one year sitting on a piano stool.
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Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don't understand.
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