William Golding
The pile of guts was a black blob of flies that buzzed like a saw. After a while these flies found Simon. Gorged, they alighted by his runnels of sweat and drank. They tickled under his nostrils and played leapfrog on his thighs. They were black and iridescent green and without number; and in front of Simon, the Lord of the Flies hung on his stick and grinned. At last Simon gave up and looked back; saw the white teeth and dim eyes, the blood—and his gaze was held by that ancient, inescapable recognition.Collection: Eye
Put simply the novel stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character. That is the service a novel renders.Collection: Book
I'm not a critic so much of my own writing. People must make up their own minds over that.Collection: Writing
I suppose I'd have to say that my favourite author is Homer. After Homer's Ilaid, I'd name The Odyssey, and then I'd mention a number of plays of Euripides.Collection: Play
I play the piano passionately and inaccurately. Indeed, I worked out the other day that of my seventy-five years; I have spent at least one year sitting on a piano stool.Collection: Piano
Beethoven for listening; Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven for playing as well as Bach and Prokofiev and so on. If I kept going, this list would spiral. It's as wide as literature; in fact, it is probably wider.Collection: Listening
One thing should be put firmly. Where people have commented on that novel [The Paper Men], they generally criticize the poor academic, Rick L. Tucker, who is savaged by the author, Wilfred Barclay. I don't think people have noticed that I have been far ruder about Barclay than I have been about Tucker. Tucker is a fool, but Barclay is a swine. The author really gets his come-uppance.Collection: Men
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.Collection: India
Percival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.Collection: Mother
People don't help much.Collection: People
Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind's essential illness.Collection: Effort
I don't think they [contemporary writers] read me either. I mean, if we're concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work.Collection: Writing
His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.Collection: Memories
You have the older generation like Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson who are not as old as Graham Greene, but still are coming on. I dare say anyone who knew the scene better than I know it could fill it in with a very satisfactory supply of novels.Collection: Irises
He became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things. He talked to them, urging them, ordering them. Driven back by the tide, his footprints became bays in which they were trapped and gave him the illusion of mastery.Collection: Exercise
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.Collection: Conscious
The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers and won't tell.Collection: Skulls
Philosophy and Religion-what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?Collection: Philosophy
But forgiveness must not only be given but received also.Collection: Forgiveness
I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.Collection: Stories
I will tell you what man is. He is a freak, an ejected foetus robbed of his natural development, thrown out into the world with a naked covering of parchment, with too little room for his teeth and a soft bulging skull like a bubble. But nature stirs a pudding there.Collection: Men
Heaven lies around us in our infancy.Collection: Lying
Which is better--to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?Collection: Law
Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.Collection: Experience
I hope my books make statements about our general condition.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Stories
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.Collection: Book
He lost himself in a maze of thoughts that were rendered vague by his lack of words to express them. Frowning, he tried again.Collection: Mazes
This is our island. It's a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we'll have fun.Collection: Fun
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?Collection: Hunting
I do think that art that doesn't communicate is useless.Collection: Art
I wouldn't have thought that the techniques of story-telling, which is what the novel is after all, can vary much because there are two things involved.There's a story and there's a listener, whose attention you have to keep. Now the only way in which you can keep a reader's attention to a story is in his wanting to know what is going to happen next. This puts a fairly close restriction on the method you must use.Collection: Two
The mask was a thing on it's own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.Collection: Self
There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.Collection: Men
When you take a child who's hollering like hell, sit him on your knee, and say "once upon a time", you stop him hollering. As long as you go on telling him a story, he will listen. Novelists who neglect this fundamental effect do so at their peril. They become what is known as the experimental novelist, and an experimental novel is not really a novel at all.Collection: Children
We just got to go on, that's all. That's what grownups would do.Collection: Goes On
It is at least scientifically respectable to postulate that at the centre of a black hole the laws of nature no longer apply. 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.Collection: Religious
Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?Collection: Hunting
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.Collection: Player
Worse than madness. Sanity.Collection: Madness
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.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Wise
To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may beCollection: Believe
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?Collection: Thinking
The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.Collection: World
We're not savages. We're English.Collection: Savages
I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.Collection: Particular
Are we savages or what?Collection: Savages
Experimental novels are sometimes terribly clever and very seldom read. But the story that appeals to the child sitting on your knee is the one that satisfies the curiosity we all have about what happened then, and then, and then. This is the final restriction put on the technique of telling a story. A basic thing called story is built into the human condition. It's what we are; it's something to which we react.Collection: Children