Best 46 quotes of William Boyd on MyQuotes

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

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.

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.

Humankind can tolerate only so much rejection.

I don't think they'll ever make a retro Bond.

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

I have this lock of hair that keeps falling across my forehead. It drives me mad.

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

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.

I let people off the hook too easily.

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

In the broad spectrum of the arts, two worlds rarely overlap - the literary world and the world of rock music.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

She's half mad and three parts drunk.

Sometimes limbo is a tolerable place to be stuck.

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.

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

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

We all possess, like it or not, the people we know, and are possessed by them in turn.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All film technique, I am convinced (and like many of my theories I am probably alone in adhering to it), originates in dreaming. We could dream slow motion before the moving camera was invented. In our dreams we could cut between parallel actions, we assembled montage shots long before some self-important Russian claimed to show us how. This is where film derives its particular power. It re-creates on screen what has been going on in our unconscious.

Any fool can “obey” an order,’ Hamo said, darkly. ‘The clever thing is to interpret it.

As I write this I feel that draining, hollowing helplessness that genuine love for another person produces in you. It's at these moments that we know we are going to die. Only with Freya, Stella and Gail. Only three. Better than none.

Bethany stands in the middle of the enormous, apparently endless beach surrounded by square miles of damp sand, the surf still some hundred yards off, the light pearly and uniform, the horizon a blurry, darker grey line shading into the clouds. Turning, she sees the black-green jagged stripe of the pines behind the dunes and, beyond that, more unchanging grey sky. A kind of dizziness afflicts her – she senses her insignificance, a small two-legged homunculus in the midst of all this space, a mere speck, a tiny crawling gnat in this elemental simplicity of sand, water and sky. She squats on her haunches, worried she might fall over, and to distract herself takes out her camera and frames a shot of the beach, the sea and the packed clouds – it looks like an abstract painting. Click. It looks like an abstract painting by – what was his name? Colour-field paintings they are called, the three layers of colour-fields in this case being broad, horizontal bands of dark taupe, slate grey, nebulous tarnished silver. It is rather beautiful. She stands up, feeling equilibrium return – maybe she was hungry, and felt faint for a second or two or maybe, she wonders, maybe she has experienced an actual existential moment – an epiphany – and has seen clearly the reality of her place in the world and has felt the nothingness, the vast indifference of the universe…

he needed the security of other bodies.

Hot crumpets with butter and jam - what could be more ambrosial?

I chided her gently, reminding her that you can't make these unilateral pacts with life. You can't say: that's it, my emotions are securely locked away, now I'm impregnable, safe from the world's cruelties and disappointments. Better to take them on, come what may, I said, see what strength you have within you.

I say to myself, at last you are in tune with the universe.

It was pleasant - and the sense of otherness was nice, that there were two people involved in this process, that we were each giving something to the other.

I walked out this evening to the bottom of the garden and smoked a cigarette. Last week I planted an acer in the furthest bed from the house, in honour of our new baby. The sapling is as tall as me and, by all accounts, it can grow forty feet tall. So, in thirty year's time, if we're still here I can come back and see this tree in its maturity. But the thought depresses me: in thirty years' time I'll be in my mid-sixties and I realize that these forward projections that you make, so unreflectingly, in your life are beginning to run out. Suppose I'd said in forty years' time? That would be pushing it, Fifty? I'll probably be gone by then. Sixty? Dead and buried, for sure. Thank Christ I didn't plant an oak. Is that a good definition of 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.

I was convinced I had overdrawn my balance of good fortune; that whatever haphazard benevolence the impassive universe might hold towards me was all but gone.

Meeting Hettie again made him achingly conscious once more of the irrefutable nature of his obsession with her. Obsession - or love? Or was it something more unhealthy - a kind of craving, an addiction?

Mr Lysander Rief looks like someone who is far more at ease occupying the cold security of the dark; a man happier with the dubious comfort of the shadows.

Mr. Schmidt had screamed at me in New York: LOSER! You English Loser…I suppose he thought it was the most grievous insult he could hurl. But such a curse doesn’t really have any effect on an English person—or a European—it seems to me. We know we’re all going to lose in the end so it is deprived of any force as a slur. But not in the USA. Perhaps this is the great difference between the two worlds, this concept of Loserdom. In the New World it is the ultimate mark of shame—in the Old it prompts only a wry sympathy.

That evening, after Romer had left so peremptorily, she had gone through to the salon to talk to her father. A job for the British government, she told him. £500 a year, a British passport. He feigned surprise but it was obvious that Romer had briefed him to a certain extent. 'You'd be a British citizen, with a passport,' her father said, his features incredulous, almost abjectly so - as if it were unthinkable that a nonentity such as he should have a daughter who was a British citizen. 'Do you know what I would give to be a British citizen?' he said, all the while with his left hand miming a sawing motion at his right elbow.

Those of us who have the luck to enjoy good health forget about this vast parallel universe of the unwell-their daily miseries, their banal ordeals. Only when you cross that frontier into the world of ill-health do you recognize its quiet, massive presence, its brooding permanence.