William Golding

I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men; they are far superior and always have been.

Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.

The journey of life is like a man riding a bicycle. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. We know that if he stops moving and does not get off he will fall off.

I have been in many countries, and I have found there people examining their own love of life, sense of peril, their own common sense. The one thing they cannot understand is why that same love of life, sense of peril and above all common sense, is not invariably shared among their leaders and rulers.

A novel ensures that we can look before and after, take action at whatever pace we choose, read again and again, skip and go back. The story in a book is humble and serviceable, available, friendly, is not switched on and off but taken up and put down, lasts a lifetime.

While I was still a boy, I came to the conclusion that there were three grades of thinking; and since I was later to claim thinking as my hobby, I came to an even stranger conclusion - namely, that I myself could not think at all.

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.

I must have been an unsatisfactory child for grownups to deal with. I remember how incomprehensible they appeared to me at first, but not, of course, how I appeared to them.

Childhood is a disease - a sickness that you grow out of.

Since most scientists are just a bit religious, and most religious are seldom wholly unscientific, we find humanity in a comical position. His scientific intellect believes in the possibility of miracles inside a black hole, while his religious intellect believes in them outside it.

I am optimistic when I consider the spiritual dimension which the scientist's discipline forces him to ignore.

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.