Quotes from William Golding

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.

The rules!" shouted Ralph, "you're breaking the rules!" "Who cares?

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

People don't help much.

He lost himself in a maze of thoughts that were rendered vague by his lack of words to express them. Frowning, he tried again.

Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood.

the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.

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.

For a small island [Great Britain], the place is remarkably diverse.

I hope my books make statements about our general condition.

Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.

How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?

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

Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.

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.

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

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.

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