William Golding

When I wrote 'Lord of the Flies' - I had no idea it would even get published.

I'd rather there wasn't an afterlife, really. I'd much rather not be me for thousands of years.

They accepted the pleasures of morning, the bright sun, the whelming sea and sweet air, as a time when play was good and life so full that hope was not necessary and therefore forgotten.

It wasn't until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's, and then everything followed from there.

He lost himself in a maze of thoughts that were rendered vague by his lack of words to express them. Frowning, he tried again.

I'm scared of him," said Piggy, "and that's why I know him. If you're scared of someone you hate him but you can't stop thinking about him. You kid yourself he's all right really, an' then when you see him again; it's like asthma an' you can't breathe.

If I blow the conch and they don't come back; then we've had it. We shan't keep the fire going. We'll be like animals. We'll never be rescued." "If you don't blow, we'll soon be animals anyway.

The rules!" shouted Ralph, "you're breaking the rules!" "Who cares?

The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.

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

The greatest ideas are the simplest.

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

Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars.

His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.

We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?

Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!

Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.

If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?

Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind's essential illness.