William Golding Quotes - Page 2

I will tell you what man is. He is a freak, an ejected foetus robbed of his natural development, thrown out into the world with a naked covering of parchment, with too little room for his teeth and a soft bulging skull like a bubble. But nature stirs a pudding there.

We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?

Which is better--to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?

Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.

Childhood is a disease - a sickness that you grow out of.

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.

I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.

I hope my books make statements about our general condition.

There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.

We just got to go on, that's all. That's what grownups would do.

He lost himself in a maze of thoughts that were rendered vague by his lack of words to express them. Frowning, he tried again.

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.

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.

The mask was a thing on it's own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.

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?

I wouldn't have thought that the techniques of story-telling, which is what the novel is after all, can vary much because there are two things involved.There's a story and there's a listener, whose attention you have to keep. Now the only way in which you can keep a reader's attention to a story is in his wanting to know what is going to happen next. This puts a fairly close restriction on the method you must use.

This is our island. It's a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we'll have fun.

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.

I do think that art that doesn't communicate is useless.

It is at least scientifically respectable to postulate that at the centre of a black hole the laws of nature no longer apply. Since most scientists are just a bit religious and most religious are seldom wholly unscientific we find humanity in a comical position. His scientific intellect believes in the possibility of miracles inside a black hole while his religious intellect believes in them outside it.

When you take a child who's hollering like hell, sit him on your knee, and say "once upon a time", you stop him hollering. As long as you go on telling him a story, he will listen. Novelists who neglect this fundamental effect do so at their peril. They become what is known as the experimental novelist, and an experimental novel is not really a novel at all.

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.

Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?

I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.

He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.