Quote

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

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
Called
Wine
Palms
Come
Standards
Mythology
Kind
West
African
Really
Writer
Standard
Novel
Remarkable
Told
English
Amos
Courses
Fantasy
Nigerian
Course
Across
Palm

More quotes by William Golding

Image
Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to be an autobiography. That's what you could say about it.
William Golding
Image
Of the authors writing in English, I'd mention Shakespeare and Milton. But all this is terribly high-hat and makes me sound very po-faced, I'm afraid however, I just happen to like these enormous, swinging, great creatures.
William Golding
Image
However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
William Golding
Image
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.
William Golding
Image
Heaven lies around us in our infancy.
William Golding
Image
I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.
William Golding
Image
We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.
William Golding
Image
I suppose I'd have to say that my favourite author is Homer. After Homer's Ilaid, I'd name The Odyssey, and then I'd mention a number of plays of Euripides.
William Golding
Image
Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.
William Golding
Image
People don't help much.
William Golding
Image
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.
William Golding
Image
No human endeavour can ever be wholly good... it must always have a cost.
William Golding
Image
Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!
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
One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.
William Golding
Image
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.
William Golding
Image
I don't think they [contemporary writers] read me either. I mean, if we're concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work.
William Golding
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.
William Golding