The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.
William Golding
Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply. We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, ''How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?''
William Golding
Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
William Golding
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.
William Golding
Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.
William Golding
It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.