Sir William Gerald Golding, CBE FRSL was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954), he would go on to publish another twelve volumes of fiction in his lifetime. In 1980, he was awarded the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage, the first novel in what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. These William Golding quotes will motivate you.
Best William Golding Quotes
- “I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.” ~ William Golding
- “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…” ~ William Golding , William Golding quotes on evil
- “We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.” ~ William Golding
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“What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?” ~ William Golding
- “However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.” ~ William Golding
- “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.” ~ William Golding
- “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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“The thing is – fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream.” ~ William Golding
- “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.” ~ William Golding
- “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.” ~ William Golding
- “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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“Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.” ~ William Golding
- “I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.” ~ William Golding
- “How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?” ~ William Golding
- “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.” ~ William Golding
- “No human endeavor can ever be wholly good… it must always have a cost.” ~ William Golding
- “My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.” ~ William Golding
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“Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us.” ~ William Golding
- “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
- “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?” ~ William Golding
- “At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.” ~ William Golding
- “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.” ~ William Golding
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“The greatest ideas are the simplest.” ~ William Golding
- “What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.” ~ William Golding
- “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.” ~ William Golding
- “Which is better–to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?” ~ William Golding
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“Childhood is a disease – a sickness that you grow out of.” ~ William Golding
- “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.” ~ William Golding
- “But forgiveness must not only be given but received also.” ~ William Golding
- “I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a storyteller.” ~ William Golding
- “We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?” ~ William Golding
- “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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“I do think that art that doesn’t communicate is useless.” ~ William Golding
- “I hope my books make statements about our general condition.” ~ William Golding
- “There’s a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.” ~ William Golding
- “This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we’ll have fun.” ~ William Golding
- “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.” ~ William Golding
- “Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.” ~ William Golding
- “Heaven lies around us in our infancy.” ~ William Golding
- “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.” ~ William Golding
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“Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?” ~ William Golding
- “The mask was a thing on its own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness.” ~ William Golding
- “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.” ~ William Golding
- “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
- “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
- “We just got to go on, that’s all. That’s what grownups would do.” ~ William Golding
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“We’re not savages. We’re English.” ~ William Golding
- “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.” ~ William Golding
- “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.” ~ William Golding
- “One’s intelligence may march about and about a problem, but the solution does not come gradually into view. One moment it is not. The next it is there.” ~ William Golding
- “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” ~ William Golding
- “One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.” ~ William Golding
- “Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars.” ~ William Golding
- “The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he’s written it.” ~ William Golding
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“You’ll get back to where you came from.” ~ William Golding
- “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.” ~ William Golding
- “Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.” ~ William Golding
- “Worse than madness. Sanity.” ~ William Golding
- “Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.” ~ William Golding
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“I am here, and here is nowhere in particular.” ~ William Golding
- “Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don’t understand.” ~ William Golding
- “It may be — I hope it is — redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable.” ~ William Golding
- “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?” ~ William Golding
- “There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.” ~ William Golding
- “He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.” ~ William Golding
