William Boyd Quotes & Sayings

A list of the thirteen types of photograph (plus an afterthought): Aide-memoire Reportage Work of art Topography Erotica/Pornography Advertisement Abstract image Literature Text Autobiography Compositional Functional illustration Snapshot — William Boyd

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

She felt weary and careworn, in the way one often does before the big job of work is tackled; that sense of premature or projected exhaustion that is the breeding ground of all procrastination. — William Boyd

So much for my great vendetta, so much for the tireless hunt for my betrayer. Isn't this how life turns out, more often than not? It refuses to conform to your needs - the narrative needs that you feel are essential to give rough shape to your time on this earth. — William Boyd

In the broad spectrum of the arts, two worlds rarely overlap - the literary world and the world of rock music. — William Boyd

but you're giving a very good impression of a lovelorn fool pining for his girl. — William Boyd

David Gascoyne once told me that the only point of keeping a journal was to concentrate of the personal, the diurnal minutiae, and forget the great significant events in the world at large. — William Boyd

I've never met a vegetarian that I liked, curiously. You might have been the exception, of course"

Solo — William Boyd

Any fool can "obey" an order,' Hamo said, darkly. 'The clever thing is to interpret it. — William Boyd

We all possess, like it or not, the people we know, and are possessed by them in turn. — William Boyd

Here at its extremities the terrified transients gathered, gazing out at the vast refulgent ocean for some sign of security. We — William Boyd

All the itch and clutter of the world, its bother and fuss, its nagging pettiness, can wear you down so easily. And this is why I like the beach ... — William Boyd

A Horrible thought: could this be the pattern of my life ahead? Every ambition thwarted, every dream stillborn? But a seconds reflection tells me that what I'm currently experiencing is shared by all sentient, suffering human beings, except for the very, very few: the genuinely talented - the odd, rare genius - and, of course, the exceptionally lucky swine. — William Boyd

That evening, after Romer had left so peremptorily, she had gone through to the salon to talk to her father. A job for the British government, she told him. £500 a year, a British passport. He feigned surprise but it was obvious that Romer had briefed him to a certain extent.
'You'd be a British citizen, with a passport,' her father said, his features incredulous, almost abjectly so - as if it were unthinkable that a nonentity such as he should have a daughter who was a British citizen. 'Do you know what I would give to be a British citizen?' he said, all the while with his left hand miming a sawing motion at his right elbow. — William Boyd

Are there aspects of our lives - things we do, feel and think - that we daren't confess, even to ourselves, even in the absolute privacy of our private record. — William Boyd

I stopped and filled my lungs, smelling Africa - smelling dust, woodsmoke, a perfume from a flower, something musty, something decaying. — William Boyd

Because it seems to me that to be human you have to be able to compromise. — William Boyd

What drew me down there, I wonder, to the edge of the garden? I remember the summer light--the trees, the bushes,the grass luminously green, basted by the bland, benevolent late-afternoon sun. Was it the light? But there was the laughter, also, coming from where a group of people had gathered by the pond. Someone must have been horsing around making everyone else laugh. The light and laughter, then. — William Boyd

Loss adjusters are noble men who frustrate and negate the bland promises of insurance. We act out of the great unbending principles in life: nothing is sure, nothing is certain, nothing is free, nothing is forever. It is a noble calling. — William Boyd

Sitting in this small pub with its cool flagged floor, listening to the murmuring voices of the haymakers and the click of dominoes falling, drinking beer here in the midle of summer in England in 1914, he suddenly felt a stillness creep up on him as if he were suffering from a form of mental palsy
as if time had stopped and the world's turning, also. It was a strange sensation
that he would be for ever stuck in this late June day in 1914 like a fly in amber
the past as irrelevant to him as the future. A perfect statis; the most alluring inertia. — William Boyd

The wounded, the incomplete, the unbalanced, the malfunctioning, the ill seek each other out: like attracted to like. — William Boyd

LOSER! You English lose ... I suppose he thought it was the most grievous insult he could hurl. But such a curse doesn't really have any effect on an English person - or a European - it seems to me. We know we're all going to lose in the end so it is deprived of any force as a slur. — William Boyd

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

Hot crumpets with butter and jam - what could be more ambrosial? — William Boyd

Curious how these early linguistic abilities are so fragile, how unthinkingly and easily the brain lets them go. — William Boyd

Is it possible to live reasonably without lying? Do lies form the natural foundation of all human relationships, the thread that stitches our individual selves together? — William Boyd

People lead their real, most interesting lives under cover of secrecy — William Boyd

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

There was something facile and shallow about male beauty, she thought. — William Boyd

Romer's idea, like all good ideas, was very simple: false information can be just as useful, influential, as telling, transforming or as damaging as true information. — William Boyd

Human beings are interested in the human condition. — William Boyd

Real life is never, never as simple as a movie. — William Boyd

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

Even though I've been an avid consumer of contemporary music since my early teens, the world of rock music has always been at something of a distance - I listen to it, read about it, I talk about it, but I've had little or no contact with its denizens. — William Boyd

From time to time Eva would venture on deck to gaze at the grey sky,the grey turbulent water and the grey ships with their belching smoke stacks butting and smashing onward through the waves and jagged swells - disappearing in explosions of wintry spume from time to time - gamely making for the British Isles — William Boyd

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. — William Boyd

and thin, with the slight stoop — William Boyd

True learning only occurs when you love the subject you are studying and then the acquiring of knowledge is effortless because it is also a pleasure. — William Boyd

We talked filth for a pleasant half hour. — William Boyd

Old Testament prophets. 'You savvy dis fetish thing? — William Boyd

I should learn to be more craftily evasive, I thought: a bad evasion is tantamount to telling the truth. — William Boyd

what is it about me and basements? Why do I like the semi-subterranean life? — William Boyd

Looking over the beach and the ocean as the sun begins to drop down in the west, a strange sense of pride: pride in all I've done and lived through, proud to think of the thousands of people I've met and known and the few I've loved. — William Boyd

I know many older writers who were very successful and whose books are now out of print, so you have to go to antiquarian booksellers to buy their fifth or eighth novel or whatever it is. — William Boyd

She found a mossy hollow between the roots of a tree and, putting on her mackintosh, huddled down in her makeshift bed. She ate one sandwich and saved the others for the night, thinking that she was rather enjoying the progress of this adventure, thus far, and almost looking forward to her night in the open air. The hurry of the fast water rushing over the round pebbly rocks of the river bed was soothing: it made her feel less alone and she felt she had no need for her candle to keep the gathering darkness at bay - in fact she was rather relieved to be away from her colleagues and the instructors at Lyne Manor. — William Boyd

Bond went back to room 325 and poured himself two fingers of bourbon from his bottle and switched on the television while he waited for Delmont. He watched a game of baseball uncomprehendingly - the Senators versus the Royals - thinking that it made cricket seem exciting. — William Boyd

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. — William Boyd

Time is a racehorse, eating up the furlongs as it gallops towards the finish line. Look away for a moment, be preoccupied for a moment, and then imagine what has passed you by. — William Boyd

I write - poignantly, in the most heartfelt way - about how I miss her and how I detest my life in this school and she responds with detailed plans for her future life as an archaeologist or philosopher or - new, this - a veterinary surgeon. — William Boyd

They are all about romance, about life's excitement and adventure and it's essential sadness and transience. They savour everything both fine and bittersweet that life has to offer us - a stoical in the hedonism. — William Boyd

Those were the years when I was truly happy. Knowing that is both a blessing and a curse. It's good to acknowledge that you found true happiness in your life - in that sense your life has not been wasted. But to admit that you will never be happy like that again is hard. — William Boyd

he needed the security of other bodies. — William Boyd

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. — William Boyd

Writing a film - more precisely, adapting a book into a film - is basically a relentless series of compromises. The skill, the "art," is to make those compromises both artistically valid and essentially your own ... It has been said before but is worth reiterating: writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a film is like swimming in the bath. — William Boyd

I don't think they'll ever make a retro Bond. — William Boyd

No human being is entirely innocent — William Boyd

Feelings of depression; feelings of frustration; feelings of emptiness in the face of all this randomness - done down by the haphazard, yet again. — William Boyd

At a time when there's younger writers starting up and it's inevitable that you're becoming less fashionable, at a time when the industrial pressures apply more and more to books, how do you keep a book you wrote 28 years ago selling well year on year? Because it really is getting harder. — William Boyd

Happenstance intersecting with received wisdom produces something entirely new and significant — William Boyd

Bond went into the lobby bar to gather his thoughts and ordered a vodka martini, explaining to the barman the best way to achieve the effect of vermouth without diluting the vodka too much. Ice in the shaker, add a slurp of vermouth, pour out the vermouth, add the vodka, shake well, strain into a chilled glass, add a slice of lemon peel, no pith. — William Boyd

In my mind Greece is reduced to one vast pile of shattered marble, shimmering in a heat aze. — William Boyd

The air smelt of booze, sweat and cheap perfume - redolent of sex and danger. There was a kind of frontier recklessness about the atmosphere, Bond thought, and recognised its allure. — William Boyd

This cackit place ... They poor darkies. A greeshie way to go." He clenched his fists. "I'm a snool, a glaikit sumph. Nocht but rain, howdumdied all day o'boot. I've lost my noddle. Camsteerie bloody country." He gave a harsh laugh. "No strunt. Any haughmagandie? Never. Dunged into the ground. ... I could greet I tell you" ... He could only understand one word in three, but this time he knew how the little man felt. — William Boyd

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

There is a disconnect between the film Bond and the literary Bond which is their contemporaneity. I don't suffer from that. — William Boyd

Mr Lysander Rief looks like someone who is far more at ease occupying the cold security of the dark; a man happier with the dubious comfort of the shadows. — William Boyd

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. — William Boyd

I let people off the hook too easily. — William Boyd

The only times we are consciously aware of the authorship of a photograph, I would argue, are when we contemplate the photographs we ourselves have taken (or those of friends and family) or when we go deliberately to the photographers monograph or exhibition. The signed image - the appropriated, the owned image - is by far the rarest in this pullulating world of pictures. — William Boyd

When I think of my youth, he went in, what we took for granted, what we assumed was for ever certain, for ever permanent. — William Boyd

It was like picking a scab off a sore; he actually wanted scar tissue - it would be quite wrong to try and forget, to blank it all out. Every fraught memory that lurked here had played its role: everything he was today was an indirect result of the life he had led then. It confirmed the rightness of every step he had taken. — William Boyd

Mr. Schmidt had screamed at me in New York: LOSER! You English Loser ... I suppose he thought it was the most grievous insult he could hurl. But such a curse doesn't really have any effect on an English person - or a European - it seems to me. We know we're all going to lose in the end so it is deprived of any force as a slur. But not in the USA. Perhaps this is the great difference between the two worlds, this concept of Loserdom. In the New World it is the ultimate mark of shame - in the Old it prompts only a wry sympathy. — William Boyd

...I watched the day slip into night, noting the wondrous tonal transformations of the sunset on its dimmer switch, how blood-orange can shade imperceptibly into ice-blue on the knife-edge of the horizon, listening to the sea's interminable call for silence - shh, shh, shh. — William Boyd

Is that a good definition of marking the ageing watershed? That moment when you realize - quite rationally, quite unemotionally - that the world in the not-so-distant future will not contain you: that the trees you planted will continue growing but you will not be there to see them. — William Boyd

We never love anyone. Not really. We only love our idea of another person. It is some conception of our own that we love. We love ourselves, in fact. — William Boyd

The best often seem the worst — William Boyd

I have always thought if you are going to make a film, it's much better to have an original script that will play to film's strengths. — William Boyd

However long your stay on this small planet lasts, and whatever happens during it, the most important thing is that-from time to time-you feel life's sweet caress. — William Boyd

The view backward showed you all the twists and turns your life had taken, all the contingencies and chances, the random elements of good luck and bad luck that made up one person's existence. — William Boyd

I stood there in the kitchen, watching her staring across the meadow still searching for her nemesis and I thought, suddenly, that this is all our lives - this is the one fact that applies to us all, that makes us what we are, our common mortality, our common humanity. One day someone is going to come and take us away: you don't need to have been a spy, I thought, to feel like this. — William Boyd

Sometimes limbo is a tolerable place to be stuck. — William Boyd

It terrifies me, the fragility of these moments in our lives. — William Boyd

I have to start my real life soon, before I die of boredom and frustration. — William Boyd

Maybe we should go by tube', he said.
A taxi'll come', she said. 'I'm in no hurry'.
She remembered something a woman in Paris had told her once. A woman in her forties, much married, elegant, a little world-weary. There is nothing easier in this world, this woman had claimed, than getting a man to kiss you. Oh really? Eva had said, so how do you do that? Just stand close to a man, the woman has said, very close, as close as you can without touching - he will kiss you in one minute or two. It's inevitable. For them it's like an instinct - they can't resist. Infaillible.
So Eva stood close to Romer in the doorway of the shop on Frith Street as he shooted and waved at the passing cars moving down the dark street, hoping one of them might be a taxi.
We're out of luck', he said, turning, to find Eva standing very close to him, her face lifted.
I'm in no hurry', she said.
He reached for her and kissed her. — William Boyd

Then, as I stood in that English garden on the soft early summer night, I felt a surge of pure well-being engulf my whole body. I felt a shivering current of happiness and benevolence flow through me. — William Boyd

Those of us who have the luck to enjoy good health forget about this vast parallel universe of the unwell-their daily miseries, their banal ordeals. Only when you cross that frontier into the world of ill-health do you recognize its quiet, massive presence, its brooding permanence. — William Boyd

A vague worry has started alongside my self-satisfaction: I have established, with amazing rapidity, a reputation for maniacal, self-destructive courage. — William Boyd

Humankind can tolerate only so much rejection. — William Boyd

Like the button, the wheelbarrow, the spoon and the umbrella, the printed book is one of the truly great inventions of mankind - beautifully efficient and enduringly ideal. The place to acquire these wonderful objects is in a bookshop, where thousands upon thousands of varieties await you. There is no substitute for the real thing. — William Boyd

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. — William Boyd

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

When we parted, she held on to me tight and said, I love you, Logan. Don't let's lose touch.' I couldn't stop the tears and neither could she, so she lit a cigarette and I said it looked like rain wasn't far off, and somehow we managed to part.
As I write this I feel that draining, hollowing helplessness that genuine love for another produces in you. It's at these moments that we know that we are going to die. Only with Freya, Stella and Gail. Only three. Better than none. — William Boyd

She's half mad and three parts drunk. — William Boyd

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

Civil time' as the chronologists call it, has always been based on the rotation of the earth. But our sense of 'private' time is innate. Neurologists think that this sense of time, which is always of the present moment, is conditioned by our nervous systems. As we grow older, our nervous systems decelerate and our sense of personal time dawdles correspondingly ... This is why our lives seem to pass more quicly as we age. — William Boyd

Meeting Hettie again made him achingly conscious once more of the irrefutable nature of his obsession with her. Obsession - or love? Or was it something more unhealthy - a kind of craving, an addiction? — William Boyd

I felt truly happy for the first time in years. Such moments should be logged and noted. — William Boyd

I love to use these phrases - 'with the greatest respect', 'in all modest', 'I humbly submit' - which in fact always imply the complete opposite. — William Boyd

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. — William Boyd

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. — William Boyd