Which is better––to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill? — William Golding

Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in! — William Golding

Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are? — William Golding

Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood. — William Golding

The thing is–fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream. — William Golding

The conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist. — William Golding

Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel. — William Golding

However you disguise novels, they are always biographies. — William Golding

As far as the novel is concerned in my own country, I think it’s in a pretty healthy state. — William Golding

The novel is very much alive, indeed. In Toronto at the Sixth Annual International Festival of Authors (October 1985) I listened to novelists by the dozen. — William Golding

I really feel the novel has certain conveniences about it and has something so fundamental about it you could almost say that as long as there is paper, there is going to be the novel. — William Golding

Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to be an autobiography. That’s what you could say about it. — William Golding

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

My father was very musical, and music plays quite a large part in my life. — William Golding

He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life,where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one’s waking life was spent watching one’s feet. — William Golding

They accepted the pleasures of morning, the bright sun, the whelming sea and sweet air, as a time when play was good and life so full that hope was not necessary and therefore forgotten. — William Golding

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

I’d rather there wasn’t an afterlife, really. I’d much rather not be me for thousands of years. — William Golding

I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller. — William Golding

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. — William Golding

You’ll get back to where you came from. — William Golding

An orotundity, which I define as Nobelitis a pomposity in which one is treated as representative of more than oneself by someone conscious of representing more than himself. — William Golding

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. — William Golding

What kind of human person has a favorite eraser? — William Golding

We’re not savages. We’re English. — William Golding

Maybe half a dozen think they are a community, but, in general terms, I think English writers tend to face outwards, away from each other, and write in their own patch, as it were. — William Golding

For a small island, the place is remarkably diverse. Writers tend to see things from their own points of view, looking in one direction very much. — William Golding

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against this as a method, but it is not what English writers do. — William Golding

I think they’ve got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages. — William Golding

Life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly, I mean. — William Golding

In India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so. — William Golding

At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing. — William Golding

Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry–babies! — William Golding

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. — William Golding