William Golding

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

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

Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket. 

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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