William Golding
The water rose further and dressed Simon's coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble.Collection: Hair
If I blow the conch and they don't come back; then we've had it. We shan't keep the fire going. We'll be like animals. We'll never be rescued." "If you don't blow, we'll soon be animals anyway.Collection: Animal
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against this as a method, but it is not what English writers do.Collection: Method
I think there might even come a time when I would read Virgil again. Ovid's Metamorphoses, perhaps, not because the music goes round and round and never comes out, but because it's an extraordinary picture of ceaseless change that never comes to an end.Collection: Thinking
My father was very musical, and music plays quite a large part in my life.Collection: Father
What could be safer than the bus center with its lamps and wheels?Collection: Lamps
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Novelists
Then you have people coming up like Malcolm Bradbury, a relatively young writer who deals with the academic scene and deals with it, I think, brilliantly.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Islands
Couldn't a fire outrun a galloping horse?Collection: Horse
As far as the novel is concerned in my own country, I think it's in a pretty healthy state.Collection: Country
I suppose drama can either take the place of a novel or can be very closely allied with it. It's quite customary to turn a successful novel into a film or a television series because you can dramatize and pictorialize a novel.Collection: Drama
Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood.Collection: Cutting
They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.Collection: Hate
I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Sweet
Latin, as we all know, ultimately broke down into Spanish, Italian, French, and so on. One wonders whether there will be an imperial parallel with English breaking down into, shall we say, North American, European, Australian, and so on. On the other hand, there is this immense, inward-driving influence of radio and television that is bringing us all back together. One could say it's a fight between the two: a fight between regionalism and the standardization through communication.Collection: Latin
I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.Collection: White
What kind of human person has a favorite eraser?Collection: Kind
Biography always has fulfiled this role. Robinson Crusoe is a biography, as is Tom Jones. You can go through the whole range of the novel, and you will find it is biography. The only difference between one example and the other is that sometimes it's a partial biography and sometimes it's a total biography. Clarissa, for example, is a partial biography of Clarissa and a partial biography of Lovelace. In other words, it doesn't follow Lovelace from when he is in the cradle, though it takes him to the grave.Collection: Differences
How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?Collection: Long
There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.Collection: Teeth
The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.Collection: News
Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Life
Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!Collection: Baby
I've come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.Collection: Wine
the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.Collection: White
Graham Greene at 82 years old was still writing, and I don't think anyone can deny the force, the expertise, and the unique quality of his writing, if you take his complete oeuvre.Collection: Writing
Life's scientific, but we don't know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Men
While I am on, I can discipline myself to that extent. When I am off, I can't discipline myself at all. On the other hand, when I am off, there are so many things I like doing, it doesn't really matter.Collection: Hands
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Book
Together, joined in effort by the burden, they staggered up the last steep of the mountain. Together, they chanted One! Two! Three! and crashed the log on to the great pile. Then they stepped back, laughing with triumphant pleasure.Collection: Two
The candle-buds opened their wide white flowers....Their scent spilled out into the air and took possession of the island.Collection: Flower
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.Collection: Fear
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.Collection: Long
Honestly, I haven't the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.Collection: Awful
For a small island [Great Britain], the place is remarkably diverse.Collection: Islands
As soon as Oliver Twist is serialized, people who would never dream of reading [Charles] Dickens, if they hadn't seen him on their box, buy the paperback.Collection: Dream
I have a confession to make. The love affair of my life has been with the Greek language. I have now reached the age when it has occurred to me that I may have read some books for the last time. I suddenly thought that there are books I cannot bear not to read again before I die. One that stands out a mile is Homer's Iliad.Collection: Book
The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.Collection: Wise
Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.Collection: Successful
The rules!" shouted Ralph, "you're breaking the rules!" "Who cares?Collection: Who Cares
The Navy's a very gentlemanly business. You fire at the horizon to sink a ship and then you pull people out of the water and say, 'Frightfully sorry, old chap.'Collection: Sorry
Of the authors writing in English, I'd mention Shakespeare and Milton. But all this is terribly high-hat and makes me sound very po-faced, I'm afraid; however, I just happen to like these enormous, swinging, great creatures.Collection: Writing
Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!Collection: Cutting