William Golding Quotes
English - Novelist September 19, 1911 - June 19, 1993

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

He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.
William Golding

Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.
William Golding

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.
William Golding

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.
William Golding

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.
William Golding

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

If you... scaled down human beings, scaled down society, if you land with a group of little boys, they are more like a scaled-down version of society than a group of little girls would be.
William Golding

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

What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
William Golding

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.
William Golding

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

Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.
William Golding

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.
William Golding

Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state.
William Golding

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
William Golding

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

I have always understood the Nazis because I am of that sort by nature.
William Golding

Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.
William Golding

Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
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

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

Boys do not evaluate a book. They divide books into categories. There are sexy books, war books, westerns, travel books, science fiction. A boy will accept anything from a section he knows rather than risk another sort. He has to have the label on the bottle to know it is the mixture as before.
William Golding

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.
William Golding

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.
William Golding

We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.
William Golding


James Lipton Quotes
American - Educator Born: September 19, 1926

Geniuses always think it's easier than we make it out to be.
James Lipton

I think that anybody's craft is fascinating. A taxi driver talking about taxi driving is going to be very, very interesting.
James Lipton

And I thought if I don't pre-interview - first of all, we couldn't afford it - but the second thing was it would force me to do my own research, which takes two weeks.
James Lipton

And I thought, my God, there's an off chance that they will say something that's really worth preserving and there is one way to do that and I knew what it was because I come from television.
James Lipton

Because - Bobby Lewis said this once to us in class, the better you get, the less credit you'll get. Because the better you are, the more it looks like walking and talking and everybody thinks they can walk and talk.
James Lipton

Comedians don't laugh. They're too busy analyzing why it's funny or not.
James Lipton

Hackman is able to live in the moment which means there is nothing for him at that split second than what is occurring in the scene.
James Lipton

I criticize those critics. The reason being that they're doing one of the worst things that ever can be done to an actor, which is to say, Look, you do what we like you to do or else.
James Lipton

I did get Tom Hanks to say, Life is just a box of chocolates.
James Lipton

I had something called the back of the chair test. Where I sit, we don't sit like you and I do. I can see a sliver right behind them and they come out and they sit like this like god students and they don't touch the back of the chair.
James Lipton

I thought we would have at most an audience of 5,000 devotees because I made the decision to stick to craft, not to gossip, not to be interested in any of the juicy stuff that they talk about on other shows, but stick to the question of craft.
James Lipton

I wanted when we began this to have a conversation, the kind that you're able to have, and the only way I knew how to do it was not to have a pre-interview.
James Lipton

I was dealing with craft, and that's the surprising thing, the number of people who have literally broken down on our stage, because when you're talking about the thing that is most important to someone, they're liable to feel something strong.
James Lipton

I was originally going to be a lawyer, and the only thing I remember from the art of cross-examination is - you can see this one coming up Sixth Avenue - never ask a question the answer to which you do not know.
James Lipton

I'll tell you why, I don't invite the ones I don't like.
James Lipton

If I were to ask you for example right now to go back with me and define those moments in your life that shaped you as a person and you began to reexamine them, something would happen.
James Lipton

It can be summed up in one sentence. Does this person have something to teach my students? No one has ever let us down.
James Lipton

Olivier was another case of a genius, who couldn't understand why anybody would have any trouble doing this, because for him it came so easily.
James Lipton

The definition of genius, really, should be that that person can do what the rest of us have to learn how to do.
James Lipton

The difference - the fundamental difference between theater acting and film acting is that film acting is disjunctive.
James Lipton

The foundation for film acting is stage acting.
James Lipton

The studio is meant to be always a place where, first of all, they can be out of spotlight, and second, where they could work with a peer group on parts that they might not have played otherwise.
James Lipton

They change. They're different. There are no two alike, that's the miracle of it. But if they have something to teach the students. You can see them writing during the show.
James Lipton

They will take a role that scares them over a role that doesn't. That's another thing I like about actors.
James Lipton

We are the only school in America, drama school in America that trains actors, writers and directors side by side for three years in a master's degree program, and we want them - to expose them to everything.
James Lipton

What I didn't know that by sticking to craft we would blow open some doors that I never saw opened before.
James Lipton

When it began I wrote this passionate letter to people I knew, studio members, of course, and other people with whom we have worked over the years and I said come and teach our students.
James Lipton