Latest William Golding Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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

  Men, Paper, Biographies

• I hope my books make statements about our general condition.

  William Golding

  Book, Conditions, Statements

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• 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.

  William Golding

  Men, Thinking, People

• 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

  Stories, Paper, Facts

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.

  William Golding

  Trying, Application

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• 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.

  William Golding

  Dream, Reading, People

• 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

  Long, Fundamentals, Paper

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• 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.

  William Golding

  Drama, Successful, Television

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.

  William Golding

  Biographies, Novel, Disguise

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• 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.

  William Golding

  Differences, Example, Roles

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• 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.

  William Golding

  Children, Clever, Curiosity

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.

  William Golding

  Successful, Novel

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• 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.

  William Golding

  Two, Technique, Attention

  "William Golding: Universal Pessimist, Cosmic Optimist". Interview with MaryLynn Scott, aurora.icaap.org. 1990.

• 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.

  William Golding

  Children, Long, Once Upon A Time

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• 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.

  William Golding

  Latin, Communication, Fighting

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.

  William Golding

  Thinking, Language, Nigeria

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• Malcolm Bradbury made the point, and I don't know whether it's a valid one or not, that the real English at the moment is not the English spoken in England or in America or even in Canada or Australia or New Zealand. The real English is the English which is a second language, so that it's rather like Latin in the days of the Roman Empire when people had their own languages, but had Latin in order to communicate.

  William Golding

  Real, Latin, Order

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• 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

  India, Odd Things, Floating

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.

  William Golding

  White, Australia, India

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• 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

  Islands, One Direction, Views

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• 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.

  William Golding

  Wine, West, Fantasy

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• For a small island [Great Britain], the place is remarkably diverse.

  William Golding

  Islands, Britain, Diverse

• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Community

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• I mean, if we're concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work. I think this is very true of English writers, but perhaps not so true of French writers, who seem to read each other passionately, extensively, and endlessly, and who then talk about it to each other - which is splendid.

  William Golding

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against this as a method, but it is not what English writers do.

  William Golding

  Method

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net