William Boyd Quotes
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In some ways, you could argue, television is doing far more interesting work than the movies. It's more fulfilling.
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Humankind can tolerate only so much rejection.
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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.
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I have teken refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquility in certainty but in permanently suspended judgement.
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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.
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We all possess, like it or not, the people we know, and are possessed by them in turn.
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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.
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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.
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I let people off the hook too easily.
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We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.
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I have this lock of hair that keeps falling across my forehead. It drives me mad.
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She's half mad and three parts drunk.
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In the broad spectrum of the arts, two worlds rarely overlap - the literary world and the world of rock music.
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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.
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Sometimes limbo is a tolerable place to be stuck.
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There's a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain.
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Dignity was the first quality to be abandoned when the heart took over the running of human affairs.
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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.
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I have to start my real life soon, before I die of boredom and frustration.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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To live as an artist requires hard work or some extraordinary good fortune to come your way.
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I tend to admire dead people more than the living. All too often, human reality diminishes the glowing reputation.