William Golding Quotes

At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.

I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '

In 'Min Kamp,' I wanted to see how far it was possible to take realism before it would be impossible to read.

A book makes claims of literary art.

To reflect the entire spectrum, the dynamics of the adventure novel must be invested with a philosophic synthesis of one kind or another.

Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?

There are three types of actions : purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters , to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature.

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.

I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for 'The Namesake,' I felt that it had to be a novel - it couldn't work as a story.

I think the book that really kind of woke me up a little bit when I was starting to write was 'Winesburg, Ohio' by Sherwood Anderson. I was in grad school at Brown, going for an M.A. in creative writing. Those stories seemed to me to be doing away with pretty writing.

There are things I read doing research, and there are certain books and writers I just love to read. There are books of Brian Morten's that I love, for instance. There's a wonderful book by an Australian writer named Helen Garner called 'The Children's Bach,' and I just love the way she uses language in it.

When it comes to the form the narrative will take, whether first person, third person, or Aunt Grace's cat, I usually find that the story tells me which voice it prefers, and that often changes as I go along. And in the end it really doesn't matter as long as the author can rig those voices all in harness to pull the same load.

There is no better way of elevating the novel than by making it into a construct which contains ideas.

I've always enjoyed that kind of thing - thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don't notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story in 600 or 700 pages.

Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.

I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.

The fundamental purpose of a novel like Count Julian is to achieve the unity of object and means of representation, the fusion of treason as scheme and treason as language.

I think that if you get too close to the character, if you do too much historical research, you may find yourself defending your view of a character against the author's view, and I think that's terribly dangerous.

We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life.

What I've tended to do is to use my own experiences to get into someone else's mind, like in Wuthering Heights.