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I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.

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
Patrick
Australia
Personally
India
Writer
White
Also
Salman
Rushdie

More quotes by William Golding

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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.
William Golding
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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
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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
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I have a confession to make. The love affair of my life has been with the Greek language. I have now reached the age when it has occurred to me that I may have read some books for the last time. I suddenly thought that there are books I cannot bear not to read again before I die. One that stands out a mile is Homer's Iliad.
William Golding
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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
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The novel is very much alive, indeed. In Toronto at the Sixth Annual International Festival of Authors (October 1985) I listened to novelists by the dozen.
William Golding
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Even if you got rid of paper, you would still have story-tellers. In fact, you had the story-tellers before you had the paper.
William Golding
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The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.
William Golding
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The rules! shouted Ralph, you're breaking the rules! Who cares?
William Golding
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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.
William Golding
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Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood.
William Golding
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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.
William Golding
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However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
William Golding
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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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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
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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.
William Golding
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I'm scared of him, said Piggy, and that's why I know him. If you're scared of someone you hate him but you can't stop thinking about him. You kid yourself he's all right really, an' then when you see him again it's like asthma an' you can't breathe.
William Golding
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Which is better--to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?
William Golding
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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.
William Golding
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Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.
William Golding