William Boyd Quotes
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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.
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The last thing you know about yourself is your effect.
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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.
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There are things in life we don't understand, and when we meet them, all we can do is let them alone.
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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.
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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.
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The last thing we ever learn about ourselves is our effect.
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There is a disconnect between the film Bond and the literary Bond which is their contemporaneity. I don't suffer from that.
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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.
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My novels are often about people who are in love or attracted to each other.