William Golding
William Golding
Sir William Gerald Golding CBEwas a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his novel Lord of the Flies, he won a Nobel Prize in Literature, and was also awarded the Booker Prize for literature in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage, the first book in what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 September 1911
listening literature
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.
diverse
For a small island [Great Britain], the place is remarkably diverse.
rushdie
I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.
sometimes robinson-crusoe novel
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.
anarchic bores crashing darwin escape freud history ideas images mental moment particular saw simplistic thoughts-and-thinking three thrust western
It was at a particular moment in the history of my own rages that I saw the Western world conditioned by the images of Marx, Darwin and Freud; and Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western world. The simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.
intellectual pessimist conviction
I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.
moving fall journey
Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say three things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. Most important of all, we know that if at any point between the beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does not get off the bicycle he will fall off it. That is a metaphor for the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of any society of living things.
beast lord
Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.
slipping world lord
The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.
passionate ease opinion
I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.
adults
We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?
news beast horrible
The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.
teeth movement lord
There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.
conscious treated oneself
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.