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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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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
Autobiography
Pretending
Paper
Novel
Wells
Well
Every
Biography
Men
Biographies

More quotes by William Golding

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He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life,where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.
William Golding
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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.
William Golding
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At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.
William Golding
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The thing is - fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.
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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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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Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against this as a method, but it is not what English writers do.
William Golding
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I suppose drama can either take the place of a novel or can be very closely allied with it. It's quite customary to turn a successful novel into a film or a television series because you can dramatize and pictorialize a novel.
William Golding
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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
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Childhood is a disease - a sickness that you grow out of.
William Golding
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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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Beethoven for listening Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven for playing as well as Bach and Prokofiev and so on. If I kept going, this list would spiral. It's as wide as literature in fact, it is probably wider.
William Golding
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They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.
William Golding
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Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.
William Golding
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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
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What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
William Golding
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However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
William Golding
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He doesn't mind if he dies... indeed, he would like to die but yet he fears to fall. He would welcome a long sleep but not at the price of falling to it.
William Golding
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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
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Worse than madness. Sanity.
William Golding