Inspirational Quotes by William Golding (English Novelist)

Sir William Gerald Golding (1911–93) was an English novelist who wrote about the human capacity for evil and guilt. This winner of the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature achieved literary success for his allegorical début novel Lord of the Flies, a classic of 20th-century English literature.

Born in St Columb Minor, Newquay, Cornwall, Golding was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Brasenose College-Oxford. He published a book of poems, worked in small theatre companies, and became a teacher.

Golding worked as a lieutenant on a Royal Navy rocket launcher during World War II. He said, later, that, as a direct result of the brutalities of war, he lost his faith even in the innocence of children, famously declaring, “Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.” He returned to teach English in Salisbury 1945–61.

Golding gained international celebrity with The Lord of the Flies (1954; film 1963 and 1990,) an alarming portrayal of the fragility of civilization. The Lord of the Flies is a chronicle of a group of schoolchildren shipwrecked on a desert island during a nuclear war. Lacking the restrictive, civilizing presence of adults, the boys at first organize themselves upon democratic values, but soon regress to savagery and act in line with their worst natures. Inspired by Golding’s years as a teacher, and colored by his war experience, The Lord of the Flies has become the subject of diverse psychological, sociological, and religious interpretations.

Golding continued to write novels, as well as essays, lectures, and novellas, but none of them achieved the success of The Lord of the Flies. His notable other works include The Inheritors (1955,) Pincher Martin (1956,) Free Fall (1959,) The Spire (1964,) The Pyramid (1967,) and Darkness Visible (1979.)

Rites of Passage (1980; Booker Prize,) Close Quarter (1987,) and Fire Down Below (1989) formed a trilogy about a 19th-century voyage from England to Australia. He left a journal of over two million words, which included his daily reflections over 20 years.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by William Golding

Anyone who moved through those years [of the Second World War] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.
—William Golding

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
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing

Childhood is a disease—a sickness that you grow out of.
—William Golding
Topics: Youth, Childhood

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
Topics: Paradise

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
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing

Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
—William Golding
Topics: Sleep

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.
—William Golding
Topics: Age, Aging

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