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
rushdie
I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.
thinking metamorphosis extraordinary
I think there might even come a time when I would read Virgil again. Ovid's Metamorphoses, perhaps, not because the music goes round and round and never comes out, but because it's an extraordinary picture of ceaseless change that never comes to an end.
october novel
The novel is very much alive, indeed. In Toronto at the Sixth Annual International Festival of Authors (October 1985) I listened to novelists by the dozen.
country thinking healthy
As far as the novel is concerned in my own country, I think it's in a pretty healthy state.
thinking people academic
Then you have people coming up like Malcolm Bradbury, a relatively young writer who deals with the academic scene and deals with it, I think, brilliantly.
scene dare novel
You have the older generation like Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson who are not as old as Graham Greene, but still are coming on. I dare say anyone who knew the scene better than I know it could fill it in with a very satisfactory supply of novels.
writing people mind
I'm not a critic so much of my own writing. People must make up their own minds over that.
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against this as a method, but it is not what English writers do.
writing thinking community
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.
point-of-view diverse
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.
novel disguise
However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
baby useless cry
Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!
hunting law rescue
Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
jobs sex people
The greatest pleasure is not - say - sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity - well, that's the job of the writer.