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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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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
Specific
General
Rather
Tell
Truth
Trying
Tries
Application
Hopes

More quotes by William Golding

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Worse than madness. Sanity.
William Golding
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He lost himself in a maze of thoughts that were rendered vague by his lack of words to express them. Frowning, he tried again.
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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If I blow the conch and they don't come back then we've had it. We shan't keep the fire going. We'll be like animals. We'll never be rescued. If you don't blow, we'll soon be animals anyway.
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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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
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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
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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
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My father was very musical, and music plays quite a large part in my life.
William Golding
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The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers and won't tell.
William Golding
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Percival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.
William Golding
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No human endeavour can ever be wholly good... it must always have a cost.
William Golding
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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
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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.
William Golding
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Are we savages or what?
William Golding
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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
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Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don't understand.
William Golding
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I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.
William Golding
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The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.
William Golding
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Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
William Golding