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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Maybe there is a beast. Maybe its only us.

I am here and here is nowhere in particular.

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

History is the nothing people write about a nothing.

There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.

There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.

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

I always have trouble remembering three things: faces, names, and - I can't remember what the third thing is.

There are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherein he that cannot read A, B, C may read our natures.

There was a time when people said, 'Jim, if you keep on making faces, your face will freeze like that.' Now they just say, 'Pay him!'

Waste no time with revolutions that do not remove the causes of your complaints but simply change the faces of those in charge.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

My sisters said, Why do you make those faces? You make yourself so ugly.

We must act swiftly in order to halt the rate of decay our planet faces.

Since Social Security faces a large gap between what it promises younger workers and what it can afford to pay them, private savings will likely need to play a larger role in retirement planning for younger workers.

The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces.

I thought I was benefiting the Indians as well as the government, by taking them all over the United States, and giving them a correct idea of the customs, life, etc., of the pale faces, so that when they returned to their people they could make known all they had seen.

There is only one woman in the world. One woman, with many faces.

Japan is dealing us a dead hand. For two years we have watched the Japanese drag their feet and we can't let them continue to slam the door in our faces.

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

It's very schizophrenic because I like a lot of very straight pop, like Small Faces, Stones, Kinks; and on the other hand, I like a lot of avant garde things.

We, the generation that faces the next century, can add the solemn injunction "If we don't do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable."