Art & Creativity Quote by William Golding

Golding’s line is a tidy paradox with a sharp ethical edge: meaning is both essential and disposable. A novelist, he suggests, needs intention the way a sailor needs a compass - to begin the voyage. But once the book exists, clinging to that private map becomes a kind of vanity, an attempt to police a world that’s already been populated by other minds.

The subtext is a rebuke to authorial tyranny. Golding came of age amid mid-century battles over interpretation, when writers were increasingly treated as public authorities on their own symbolism. Lord of the Flies is practically a magnet for neat allegories and classroom certainties; Golding spent decades watching readers insist the novel “means” one thing (human nature is savage, civilization is a mask) while others found different, sometimes more unsettling, arguments inside it. His answer isn’t to crown the reader as always right, but to demote the author from final judge.

“Immediately forget” reads less like amnesia than discipline. It’s advice against explaining your work to death, against treating literature as a locked safe with one combination. The line also protects the book itself: if a novel’s value depends on what the writer intended, it becomes a footnote to a biography. Golding pushes for the opposite. Once published, the text has to stand alone, generating meanings that outlive the author’s private motives, even contradict them. That’s not mystical; it’s how language works when it enters public life.