Quotes from William Golding

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

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

Are we savages or what?

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

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

He forgot his wounds, his hunger and thirst, and became fear; hopeless fear

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

If only one had time to think!

They agreed passionately out of the depths of their tormented lives.

I'm scared of him, said Piggy, and that's why I know him. If you're scared of someone you hate him but you can't stop thinking about him. You kid yourself he's all right really, an' then when you see him again, it's like asthma an' you can't breathe.

The half-shut eyes were dim with the infinite cynicism of adult life.

We musn't let anything happen to Piggy, must we?

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

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.

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.

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.

People don't help much.' He wanted to explain how people were never quite what you thought they were.

Daylight might have answered yes; but darkness and the horrors of death said no.

The flames, as though they were a kind of wild life, crept as a jaguar creeps on its belly toward a line of birch-like saplings that fledged an outcrop of the pink rock.

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'.

What kind of human person has a favorite eraser?

I'm frightened. Of us.

This was a savage whose image refused to blend with that ancient picture of a boy in shorts and a shirt.

There is nothing in it of course. Just a feeling. But you can feel as if you're not hunting, but - being hunted, as if something's behind you all the time in the jungle.