Top 163 Quotes & Sayings by William Golding

Boys do not evaluate a book. They divide books into categories. There are sexy books, war books, westerns, travel books, science fiction. A boy will accept anything from a section he knows rather than risk another sort. He has to have the label on the bottle to know it is the mixture as before.

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.

A novel ensures that we can look before and after, take action at whatever pace we choose, read again and again, skip and go back. The story in a book is humble and serviceable, available, friendly, is not switched on and off but taken up and put down, lasts a lifetime.

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

I have always understood the Nazis because I am of that sort by nature.

Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state.

If you... scaled down human beings, scaled down society, if you land with a group of little boys, they are more like a scaled-down version of society than a group of little girls would be.

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.

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

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.

When I wrote 'Lord of the Flies' - I had no idea it would even get published.

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

While I was still a boy, I came to the conclusion that there were three grades of thinking; and since I was later to claim thinking as my hobby, I came to an even stranger conclusion - namely, that I myself could not think at all.

Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.

I must have been an unsatisfactory child for grownups to deal with. I remember how incomprehensible they appeared to me at first, but not, of course, how I appeared to them.

I am optimistic when I consider the spiritual dimension which the scientist's discipline forces him to ignore.

I'd rather there wasn't an afterlife, really. I'd much rather not be me for thousands of years.

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

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.

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

I have been in many countries, and I have found there people examining their own love of life, sense of peril, their own common sense. The one thing they cannot understand is why that same love of life, sense of peril and above all common sense, is not invariably shared among their leaders and rulers.

The journey of life is like a man riding a bicycle. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. We know that if he stops moving and does not get off he will fall off.

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

Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.

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.

Before the Second World War, I believed in the perfectability of social man; that a correct structure of society produced goodwill; and that, therefore, you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society. It is possible that I believe something of the same again; but after the war, I did not because I was unable to.

I hope my books make statements about our general condition.

Heaven lies around us in our infancy.

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

We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

Ralph... would treat the day's decisions as though he were playing chess. The only trouble was that he would never be a very good chess player.

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 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.

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

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...

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.

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

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

At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.

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.

But forgiveness must not only be given but received also.

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.

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

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

However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.

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

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

Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.

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

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

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

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

The greatest ideas are the simplest.