Quotes from William Golding

The folly isn't mine. It's God's folly. Even in the old days he never asked men to do what was reasonable.

There is nothing in it of course. Just a feeling. But you can feel as if you're not hunting, but - being hunted, as if something's behind you all the time in the jungle.

Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?

I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.

Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.

The candle-buds opened their wide white flowers... Their scent spilled out into the air and took possession of the island.

Lok was running as fast as he could. His head was down and he carried his thorn bush horizontally for balance and smacked the drifts of vivid buds aside with his free hand.

His manual of heaven and hell lay open before me, and I could perceive my nothingness in this scheme.

I must say that anyone who passed through those years [of World War II] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.

Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.

The greatest ideas are the simplest.

Before the Second World War, I believed in the perfectability of social man; that a correct structure of society produced goodwill; and that, therefore, you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society. It is possible that I believe something of the same again; but after the war, I did not because I was unable to.