William Golding

The Herr Doctor does not know about peoples.

— William Golding

The man who tells the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature, dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is nothing like the truth.

— William Golding

Basically I'm an optimist. Intellectually I can see man's balance is about fifty-fifty, and his chances of blowing himself up are about one to one. I can't see this any way but intellectually. I'm just emotionally unable to believe that he will do this. This means that I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist, I suppose.

— William Golding

One day I was sitting one side of the fireplace, and my wife was sitting on the other, and I suddenly said to her, “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to write a story about some boys on an island, showing how they would really behave, being boys and not little saints as they usually are in children’s books.” And she said, “That’s a first-class idea! You write it!” So I went ahead and wrote it.

— William Golding

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

— 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

I don’t like the word "allegorical", I don’t like the word "symbolic", the word I really like is "mythic" and people always think that means "full of lies" when what it really means is full of a truth that cannot be told in any other way but a story.

— William Golding

It seems to me that we do live in two worlds. There is is this physical one, which is coherent, and there is a spiritual one, which to the average man, with his flashes of religious experience, if you like to call them that — that world is very often incoherent. This experience of having two worlds to live in all the time, or… not all the time, occasionally, is a vital one and is what living is like.

— William Golding

Aren't there any grownups at all?""No grownups!

— William Golding

"Aren't you going to swim?" Piggy bore this with a kind of humble patience.

— William Golding

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

— William Golding

His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.

— William Golding

Jack stood up as he said this, the bloodied knife in his hand. The two boys faced each other. There was the brilliant world of hunting, tactics, fierce exhilaration, skill; and there was the world of longing and baffled common-sense.

— William Golding

The rules!" shouted Ralph, "you're breaking the rules!""Bollocks to the rules! We're strong — we hunt! If there's a beast, we'll hunt it down! We'll close in and beat and beat and beat — !

— William Golding

However Simon thought of the beast, there rose before his inward sight the picture of a human at once heroic and sick.

— William Golding

"You want a pig," said Roger, "like in a real hunt.""Use a littlun," said Jack, and everybody laughed.

— William Golding

Jack was on top of the sow, stabbing downward with his knife. Roger found a lodgment for his point and began to push till he was leaning his whole weight. The spear moved forward inch by inch and the terrified squealing became a high-pitched scream. Then Jack found the throat and the hot blood spouted over his hands. The sow collapsed under them and they were heavy and fulfilled upon her. The butterflies still danced, preoccupied in the center of the clearing.

— William Golding

What was the sensible thing to do?There was no Piggy to talk sense. There was no solemn assembly for debate nor dignity of the conch.

— William Golding

His voice rose under the black smoke before the burning wreckage of the island; and infected by that emotion, the other little boys began to shake and sob too. And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, 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

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

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

— 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

I don't like the word 'allegorical', I don't like the word 'symbolic' - the word I really like is 'mythic', and people always think that means 'full of lies', whereas of course what it really means is 'full of truth which cannot be told in any other way but a story'.

— William Golding

The greatest ideas are the simplest.

— William Golding

If only one had time to think!

— William Golding

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

— William Golding