Quote

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.

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
Indeed
Inaccurately
Worked
Stool
Sitting
Stools
Least
Seventy
Year
Passionately
Five
Seventies
Play
Piano
Years
Spent

More quotes by 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
In India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so.
William Golding
Image
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.
William Golding
Image
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.
William Golding
Image
Percival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.
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
The rules! shouted Ralph, you're breaking the rules! Who cares?
William Golding
Image
His mind was crowded with memories memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.
William Golding
Image
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
Image
Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!
William Golding
Image
The greatest pleasure is not - say - sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity - well, that's the job of the writer.
William Golding
Image
Worse than madness. Sanity.
William Golding
Image
Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind's essential illness.
William Golding
Image
Then you have people coming up like Malcolm Bradbury, a relatively young writer who deals with the academic scene and deals with it, I think, brilliantly.
William Golding
Image
We just got to go on, that's all. That's what grownups would do.
William Golding
Image
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.
William Golding
Image
Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.
William Golding
Image
Which is better -- to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is? Which is better -- to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill? Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
William Golding
Image
I think there might even come a time when I would read Virgil again. Ovid's Metamorphoses, perhaps, not because the music goes round and round and never comes out, but because it's an extraordinary picture of ceaseless change that never comes to an end.
William Golding
Image
I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.
William Golding