Top 100 William Boyd Quotes
#1. 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
#2. ...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
#3. I experienced a form of grief so intense and pure I thought it would kill me.
William Boyd
#4. 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
#5. A vague worry has started alongside my self-satisfaction: I have established, with amazing rapidity, a reputation for maniacal, self-destructive courage.
William Boyd
#6. I feel very sorry for myself - that is what grief is.
William Boyd
#7. There was something facile and shallow about male beauty, she thought.
William Boyd
#8. I wasn't feeling grief: that hellish chest-crammed agony you feel - but some portion of my brain activated by the memory decided to trigger the tear ducts
William Boyd
#9. I tend to admire dead people more than the living. All too often, human reality diminishes the glowing reputation.
William Boyd
#10. But you can be too intelligent, I said. Sometimes it's not an asset it's a curse.
William Boyd
#11. It terrifies me, the fragility of these moments in our lives.
William Boyd
#12. She bought a pint of whiskey and woke to discover that she had managed to construct a presentable hangover for herself on the morning of 1 January.
William Boyd
#13. Take a look at anyone's life. Take a look at your own. In the long fold catastrophe that makes up your three-score years and ten you will encounter many cusp catastrophes along the way.
William Boyd
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Lysander saw that they were displaying all the timeworn and conventional feints and poor disguises of lovers meeting in a public place and hoping the real nature of their relationship would be invisible.
William Boyd
#18. The last thing we learn about ourselves is our effect.
William Boyd
#19. what is it about me and basements? Why do I like the semi-subterranean life?
William Boyd
#20. Any fool can "obey" an order,' Hamo said, darkly. 'The clever thing is to interpret it.
William Boyd
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. It's true: lives do drift apart for no obvious reason. We're all busy people,we can't spend our time simply trying to stay in touch. The test of a friendship is if it can weather these inevitable gaps.
William Boyd
#27. 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
#28. The idea of a priori moral judgements ('It is morally wrong to inflict gratuitous pain') is completely acceptable to the vast majority of human beings. Only a few philosophers would disagree.
William Boyd
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Curious how these early linguistic abilities are so fragile, how unthinkingly and easily the brain lets them go.
William Boyd
#32. Are our lives just the aggregate of the lies we've told? ('Lives' - the 'v' is silent.)
William Boyd
#33. As I write this I feel that draining hollowing helplessness that genuine love for another person produces in you. It's at these moments that we know we are going to die.
William Boyd
#34. I was at that level of inebriation - that hinge, that crux, that ridge - where you can decide to proceed or step back. Red warning lights were flashing on the control panel but the aeroplane was not yet in a screaming death-dive.
William Boyd
#35. Hot crumpets with butter and jam - what could be more ambrosial?
William Boyd
#36. Dignity was the first quality to be abandoned when the heart took over the running of human affairs.
William Boyd
#37. 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.
William Boyd
#38. That's ally our life amounts to in the end: the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck you experience. Everything is explained by that simple formula.
William Boyd
#41. 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
#42. It was pleasant - and the sense of otherness was nice, that there were two people involved in this process, that we were each giving something to the other.
William Boyd
#43. 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
#44. 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
#46. People lead their real, most interesting lives under cover of secrecy
William Boyd
#47. 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
#48. A warm sunny evening, the plash and gurgle of the waves in the rock pools, the rush of the cold gin. I thought for the first time of my novel, abandoned, all these years, and I came up, unprompted, with the perfect title. Octet. Octet by Logan Mountstuart. Perhaps I will surprise them all, yet.
William Boyd
#49. You think it begins to diminish with time, the pain, then it comes back and hits you with a rawness and freshness you had forgotten.
William Boyd
#50. I have teken refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquility in certainty but in permanently suspended judgement.
William Boyd
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. I have this lock of hair that keeps falling across my forehead. It drives me mad.
William Boyd
#55. The last thing you know about yourself is your effect.
William Boyd
#56. 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
#57. I stopped and filled my lungs, smelling Africa - smelling dust, woodsmoke, a perfume from a flower, something musty, something decaying.
William Boyd
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. There are things in life we don't understand, and when we meet them, all we can do is let them alone.
William Boyd
#61. I know part of my sorrow is just disguised self-pity, I needed that exchange and I worry how I'll cope without it and whether I can replace it - if only it were as easy as buying a new dog.
William Boyd
#62. Winter reveals the massive, complex, muscular organization of the ancient oak. Like an old man stripped of his Savile Row, tailored suit - no less impressive in his mature nakedness.
William Boyd
#63. 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
#64. I've never met a vegetarian that I liked, curiously. You might have been the exception, of course"
Solo
William Boyd
#65. but you're giving a very good impression of a lovelorn fool pining for his girl.
William Boyd
#66. We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.
William Boyd
#67. The wounded, the incomplete, the unbalanced, the malfunctioning, the ill seek each other out: like attracted to like.
William Boyd
#68. Gabriel thought maps should be banned. They gave the world an order and reasonableness which it did not possess.
'An Ice-cream War
William Boyd
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. I felt shocked and then saddened. life does this to you sometimes - leads you up a path and then drops you in the shit, to mix a metaphor.
William Boyd
#72. This is vexing: I feel in a kind of limbo - an author but not truly an author, true authorship being conferred by having a book physically published - a thing you can hold in your hand, purchase in a bookshop.
William Boyd
#73. Film is a medium of clear lines and broad strikes - which can be fantastic - but compared to the subtleties and nuances of a novel, it doesn't even get close.
William Boyd
#74. Human beings are interested in the human condition.
William Boyd
#75. 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
#76. In the broad spectrum of the arts, two worlds rarely overlap - the literary world and the world of rock music.
William Boyd
#77. Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary - it is the respective proportion of those two categories that make that life appear interesting or humdrum.
William Boyd
#78. There is a disconnect between the film Bond and the literary Bond which is their contemporaneity. I don't suffer from that.
William Boyd
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. Because it seems to me that to be human you have to be able to compromise.
William Boyd
#82. 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
#83. Here at its extremities the terrified transients gathered, gazing out at the vast refulgent ocean for some sign of security. We
William Boyd
#84. Maybe this is what life is like - we try to see clearly but what we see is never clear and is never going to be. The more we strive the murkier it becomes. All we are left with are approximations, nuances, multitudes of plausible explanations. Take your pick.
William Boyd
#85. What can I know? Nothing for sure. What ought I to do? Try not to hurt anyone. What may I hope for? For the best (but it won't make any difference).
William Boyd
#86. In my mind Greece is reduced to one vast pile of shattered marble, shimmering in a heat aze.
William Boyd
#87. 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
#88. When you experience bereavement at a youngish age, you suddenly realise that life is unjust and unfair, that bad things will happen, and you have to take that on board.
William Boyd
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. Describe your state of mine. Insecure. Uncertain. Feverish
William Boyd
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. There's a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain.
William Boyd
#95. To live as an artist requires hard work or some extraordinary good fortune to come your way.
William Boyd
#97. We all possess, like it or not, the people we know, and are possessed by them in turn.
William Boyd
#98. I would catch them fast, eternally, thanks to the properties of my wonderful machine. In my hands I had the power to stop time,or so I fancied.
William Boyd
#100. Sometimes limbo is a tolerable place to be stuck.
William Boyd
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