William Boyd Quotes

To live as an artist requires hard work or some extraordinary good fortune to come your way.

I let people off the hook too easily.

The last thing you know about yourself is your effect.

Dignity was the first quality to be abandoned when the heart took over the running of human affairs.

Do we change every time we have a new encounter? Are we endlessly mutable? I think these are fascinating questions: it’s a rich vein to tap, and I don’t think I have exhausted it fully yet.

It’s strange; when I was younger and people would ask, ‘Where are you from?’, I’d say, ‘West Africa’, which was odd because I’m obviously not African, but it was my home.

I have this lock of hair that keeps falling across my forehead. It drives me mad.

What’s important to me is that all of my books are in print – and, in a way, that becomes the challenge, not winning this prize or getting that review. It’s that the work is there, and you can walk into many bookshops throughout the world and buy it.

When it’s mutual, a man and a woman know, instinctively, wordlessly. They may do nothing about it, but the knowledge of that shared desire is out there in the world – as obvious as neon, saying: I want you, I want you, I want you.

We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.

Human beings are interested in the human condition.

My novels are often about people who are in love or attracted to each other.

I have teken refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquility in certainty but in permanently suspended judgement.

The last thing we ever learn about ourselves is our effect.

It’s amazing how sudden the effect is – it must be the result of a deep atavistic mating urge buried inside us. A glance and you think: ‘Yes, this is the one, this one is right for me.’ Every instinct in your body seems to sing in unison.

I tend to admire dead people more than the living. All too often, human reality diminishes the glowing reputation.

With film, you have very limited tools to convey subjectivity – voiceover, the camera’s point of view, good acting – but even the very best actor in the world is crude by comparison with what you can do in a written paragraph.

As a novelist, where do you go to tap into memories, and impressions, and sensations? It’s usually, in my experience, your early life, before you started thinking of yourself as a writer, because somehow those experiences are unadulterated.

There are things in life we don’t understand, and when we meet them, all we can do is let them alone.

I can bore for England on the subject of James Bond. But I knew I couldn’t do it frivolously; I had to take it very seriously, however much fun I was having. And I had to make myself, you know, absolutely steeped in Bond and in Fleming and that world.

I don’t think they’ll ever make a retro Bond.

In some ways, you could argue, television is doing far more interesting work than the movies. It’s more fulfilling.