William Golding Quotes

I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.

Before the Second World War I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society. .... but after the war I did not because I was unable to. I had discovered what one man could do to another... I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head...

We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.

I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.

Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say three things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. Most important of all, we know that if at any point between the beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does not get off the bicycle he will fall off it. That is a metaphor for the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of any society of living things.

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.

We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.

I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.

The thing is - fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.

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.

I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.

Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply. We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.

The greatest ideas are the simplest.

What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.

No human endeavour can ever be wholly good... it must always have a cost.

Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.

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

Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars.

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

Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.

I hope my books make statements about our general condition.

However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.

We're not savages. We're English.

To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be

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.

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.

If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?

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?

How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?

Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.

Experimental novels are sometimes terribly clever and very seldom read. But the story that appeals to the child sitting on your knee is the one that satisfies the curiosity we all have about what happened then, and then, and then. This is the final restriction put on the technique of telling a story. A basic thing called story is built into the human condition. It's what we are; it's something to which we react.

Worse than madness. Sanity.

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

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.

I know there isn't no beast—not with claws and all that, I mean—but I know there isn't no fear, either." Piggy paused. "Unless—" Ralph moved restlessly. "Unless what?" "Unless we get frightened of people.

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

Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.

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

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

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

I mean, if we're concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work. I think this is very true of English writers, but perhaps not so true of French writers, who seem to read each other passionately, extensively, and endlessly, and who then talk about it to each other - which is splendid.

Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?

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