William Golding Quotes - Page 6

A star appeared...and was momentarily eclipsed by some movement.

And I've been wearing specs since I was three.

Malcolm Bradbury made the point, and I don't know whether it's a valid one or not, that the real English at the moment is not the English spoken in England or in America or even in Canada or Australia or New Zealand. The real English is the English which is a second language, so that it's rather like Latin in the days of the Roman Empire when people had their own languages, but had Latin in order to communicate.

The water rose further and dressed Simon's coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble.

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.

As far as the novel is concerned in my own country, I think it's in a pretty healthy state.

My father was very musical, and music plays quite a large part in my life.

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.

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.

What could be safer than the bus center with its lamps and wheels?

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against this as a method, but it is not what English writers do.

Maybe half a dozen think they are a community, but, in general terms, I think English writers tend to face outwards, away from each other, and write in their own patch, as it were.

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.

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.

Couldn't a fire outrun a galloping horse?

They accepted the pleasures of morning, the bright sun, the whelming sea and sweet air, as a time when play was good and life so full that hope was not necessary and therefore forgotten.

I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.

Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood.

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.

They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.

Latin, as we all know, ultimately broke down into Spanish, Italian, French, and so on. One wonders whether there will be an imperial parallel with English breaking down into, shall we say, North American, European, Australian, and so on. On the other hand, there is this immense, inward-driving influence of radio and television that is bringing us all back together. One could say it's a fight between the two: a fight between regionalism and the standardization through communication.

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