William Boyd Quotes

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.

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

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

The last thing you know about yourself is your effect.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Humankind can tolerate only so much rejection.

She's half mad and three parts drunk.

We talked filth for a pleasant half hour.

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

Sometimes limbo is a tolerable place to be stuck.

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

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.

There's a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain.

The last thing we ever learn about ourselves is our effect.

There is a disconnect between the film Bond and the literary Bond which is their contemporaneity. I don't suffer from that.

I let people off the hook too easily.

The wounded, the incomplete, the unbalanced, the malfunctioning, the ill seek each other out: like attracted to like.

he needed the security of other bodies.

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.

When the going gets tough, the tough gets going.

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

Are our lives just the aggregate of the lies we've told? ('Lives' - the 'v' is silent.)