William Boyd Quotes

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.

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.

The last thing you know about yourself is your effect.

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

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

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.

I let people off the hook too easily.

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.

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

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

There's a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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