William Golding

“...could a face have been fashioned to fit the attitude of his consciousness where it lay suspended between life and death that face would have worn a snarl.”

“He wanted to explain how people were never quite what you thought they were.”

“We think we know.""Know? That's worse than an atom bomb, and always was.”

“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.”

“We have to face it at last. We're not all human.”

“Heaven lies around us in our infancy.”

“History is the nothing people write about a nothing.”

“You don't even care enough about us to hate us, do you?”

“The way towards simplicity is through outrage.”

“I got this to say. you are acting like a crowd of kids.”

“My darkness reaches out and fumbles at a typewriter with its tongs. Your darkness reaches out with your tongs and grasps a book. There are twenty modes of change, filter and translation between us. What an extravagant coincidence it would be if the exact quality, the translucent sweetness of her cheek, the very living curve of bone between the eyebrow and hair should survive the passage! How can you share the quality of my terror in the blacked-out cell when I can only remember it and not re-create it for myself? No. Not with you. Or only with you, in part. For you were not there.”

“Yet I was wound up. I tick. I exist. I am poised eighteen inches over the black rivets you are reading, I am in your place, I am shut in a bone box and trying to fasten myself on the white paper. The rivets join us together and yet for all the passion we share nothing but our sense of division.”

“Worse than madness. Sanity.”

“And dying is more natural than living, because what could be more unnatural than that panicstricken thing leaping and falling like a last flame beneath the ribs?”

“There ought to be some mode of life where all love is good, where one love can't compete with another but adds to it.”

“I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.”

“His manual of heaven and hell lay open before me, and I could perceive my nothingness in this scheme.”

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

“He doesn't mind if he dies... indeed, he would like to die; but yet he fears to fall. He would welcome a long sleep; but not at the price of falling to it.”

“I spit upon your God!”

“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.”

“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?”

“Life's scientific, but we don't know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.”

“But for all the feet that had trodden it, it remained ordinary dust, which seemed to make everything much sadder.”

“Girls say to me, very reasonably, 'why isn't it a bunch of girls? Why did you write this about a bunch of boys?' Well, my reply is I was once a little boy - I have been a brother, a father, I am going to be a grandfather. I have never been a sister, or a mother, or a grandmother. That's one answer. Another answer is of course to say that if you - as it were - scaled down human beings, scaled down society, if you land with a group of little boys, they are more ike a scaled-down version of society than a group of little girls would be. Don't ask me why, and this is a terrible thing to say because I'm going to be chased from hell to breakfast by all the women who talk about equality - this is nothing to do with equality at all. I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been. But one thing you can't do with them is take a bunch of them and boil them down, so to speak, into a set of little girls who would then become a kind of image of civilisation, of society. The other thing is - why aren't they little boys AND little girls? Well, if they'd been little boys and little girls, we being who we are, sex would have raised its lovely head, and I didn't want this to be about sex. Sex is too trivial a thing to get in with a story like this, which was about the problem of evil and the problem of how people are to live together in a society, not just as lovers or man and wife.”

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

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

“If you accept life dully, you can go through it moving not among things but among words.”

“I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.”

“I'm against the picture of the artist as a starry-eyed visionary not really in control or knowing what he does. I'd almost prefer the word 'craftsman'. He's like one of those old-fashioned ship builders who conceived the build of the boat in their mind and after that touched every single piece that went into the boat.”

“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.”

“It seems to me that we do live in two worlds... there is this physical one, which is coherant, and there is the spiritual one, which to the average man with his flashes of religious experience, is very often incoherant. This experience of having two worlds to live in all the time, or not all the time, is a vital one, and is what living is like.”

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

“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'.”

“Now we, if not in the spirit, have been caught up to see our earth, our mother, Gaia Mater, set like a jewel in space. We have no excuse now for supposing her riches inexhaustible nor the area we have to live on limitless because unbounded. We are the children of that great blue white jewel. Through our mother we are part of the solar system and part through that of the whole universe. In the blazing poetry of the fact we are children of the stars.”

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

“Who would sharpen a point aginst the darkness of the world?”

“The crucifixion should never be depicted. It is a horror to be veiled.”

“The whole book is posing a question. You think you've won a war - what you've done is finish a war. There was a crime committed in that war the like of which perhaps was never committed in human history. You think about it.”

“Bit by bit [the Second World War] really changed my view of what people were capable of, and therefore what human nature was.”

“I've always been puzzled, and am still at this moment in a state of confusion, between the imaginative world and the real world. It is perfectly true to say that I have at some times in my life found that the imaginative world had pushed the real world right out of the way, and was literally more real.”

“I find it very difficult to talk here now because I'm watching the sea all the time. The sea always makes me watch it all the time. I've spent hours and hours not just on the sea but just watching wave after wave come in. If it's an image of anything, I think it's an image of our own unconscious, the unconscious of our own minds... or you can put it the other way around, and that is that we have a sea in us. After all, we are sea creatures that learnt to walk on the land, are we not? And perhaps one way or another we go back to it. Every night when we dream we go back into that kind of depths, and that kind of beauty and monstrosity and mystery. So really the sea is not a single image, it can really image almost anything that the human mind can discover.”

“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.”

“You're a beast and a swine and a bloody, bloody thief!”

“Mata a fera! Corta-lhe as goelas! Espalha o sangue!”

“I tell you, money can't build your spire for you. Build it of gold and it would simply sink deeper.”

“It's simpler to believe in a miracle.”

“At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.”

“In our country for all her greatness there is one thing she cannot do and that is translate a person wholly out of one class into another. Perfect translation from one language into another is impossible. Class is the British language.”

“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.”