William Golding Quotes

Having a set, popular formula does inhibit you.

Everyone around me is so strict about keeping me grounded.

Tightness gets in the way of everything, except tightness.

I never want to get stuck in the box.

Some rules are there for a reason - but it's one thing to have a rule that protects and another to have rules that stifle.

Discipline is ... life-inhibiting, is at the very least curtailment of vital activity insofar as the latter cannot develop as it wishes but is confined within specific limits and subjected to specific rules.

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

For some reason, my whole life has been, 'You can't do this, you can't do that.'

Fear, conformity, immorality: these are heavy burdens. They drain us of creative energy. And when we are drained of creative energy, we do not create. We procreate, but we do not create.

I can have incredible self-discipline. But see, I think it's obviously a form of stupidity.

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

I don't like closed systems.

I do not like Moscow life. You live here not as you want to live, but as old women want you to.

They disallowed this and disallowed that, and now I can't even get my head above water!

You know, when you've established a certain thing, what can you do? You're stuck with it.

It's so easy to be boxed into one part and one part only.

I despise places where you have to have an assigned seat. Makes me feel like I'm at the airport.

Attempts to tame the wayward and domesticate the riotous, to make the unknowable predictable and enchain the free-roaming - all such things sound the death knell to love.

It’s often safer to be in chains than to be free.

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold onto the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own system of repression.

… obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton.

There were a lot of stop signs in my life... People telling you what to do, when to do it, and so on.

When you put a top on something and try to bottle it, that's when it dies.

A rule is a rule.