William Boyd Quotes
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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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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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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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We all possess, like it or not, the people we know, and are possessed by them in turn.
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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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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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I let people off the hook too easily.
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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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We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.
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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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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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I have this lock of hair that keeps falling across my forehead. It drives me mad.
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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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She's half mad and three parts drunk.
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I don't think they'll ever make a retro Bond.
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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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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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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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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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I have to start my real life soon, before I die of boredom and frustration.
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We talked filth for a pleasant half hour.
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To live as an artist requires hard work or some extraordinary good fortune to come your way.