William Boyd Quotes
Quotes to Explore
-
What novels do that biographies don't is get at truths by penetrating the facts, by going deeper to what's underneath fact, through invention.
-
The Lebanese people voted this time for change. So they are not satisfied with the actual situation. They want to see a new government. They want to see a new vision.
-
I was a tomboy.
-
Golf is played with the arms.
-
I can't take the theater side out of myself.
-
I was 12 years old when I had my first job, delivering packages.
-
Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.
-
I was famous from the age of 13, and after a while you become immune to it - in a good way. You look at positives and what you can do with it.
-
Since the dawn of recorded music, every generation has felt shocked by the musical tastes of the next.
-
I hardly ever write when I'm just feeling great.
-
I'm obviously really opinionated, but as a producer, you don't necessarily want the person you're working with to try to impress you - you want them to just be themselves. Then you can edit or mess around with what they've come up with. But you have to allow the artist that space.
-
There's a time that may come in an organization where leading by influence is not enough. When things are not going the way they need to go, there's a time when one has to step up... to set the organization back on the right direction.
-
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
-
National independence, and the preceding political struggles, helped create the space for literary creation in many post-colonial countries. Much of modern Indian or Chinese literature is inconceivable without the political movement for freedom from foreign rule.
-
Strange to say, the luminous world is the invisible world; the luminous world is that which we do not see. Our eyes of flesh see only night.
-
I can relax in L.A. I think I'm the only person in that town who doesn't want to act. I was an OK singer. I was an OK dancer. But acting? Never could do it.
-
I know that there are many things I could do, but I'm not interested. It's more important to be loving and to have a lively mind.
-
Factoring in millions of people when I'm writing a song is not a good idea. I don't ever do it.
-
Happiness is not a brilliant climax to years of grim struggle and anxiety. It is a long succession of little decisions simply to be happy in the moment.
-
The one who pursues revenge should dig two graves.
-
Sometimes in this game it's as good to be lucky as it is to be good.
-
Exponential Backoff was a huge part of the successful functioning of the ALOHAnet beginning in 1971, and in the 1980s it was baked into TCP, becoming a critical part of the Internet. All these decades later, it still is. As one influential paper puts it, “For a transport endpoint embedded in a network of unknown topology and with an unknown, unknowable and constantly changing population of competing conversations, only one scheme has any hope of working—exponential backoff.
-
Sometimes limbo is a tolerable place to be stuck.
