Top 43 Quotes & Sayings by William Boyd

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

Human beings are interested in the human condition.

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

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

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.

It's strange; when I was younger and people would ask, 'Where are you from?', I'd say, 'West Africa', which was odd because I'm obviously not African, but it was my home.

What's important to me is that all of my books are in print - and, in a way, that becomes the challenge, not winning this prize or getting that review. It's that the work is there, and you can walk into many bookshops throughout the world and buy it.

At a time when there's younger writers starting up and it's inevitable that you're becoming less fashionable, at a time when the industrial pressures apply more and more to books, how do you keep a book you wrote 28 years ago selling well year on year? Because it really is getting harder.

I have always thought if you are going to make a film, it's much better to have an original script that will play to film's strengths.

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

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

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.

Even though I've been an avid consumer of contemporary music since my early teens, the world of rock music has always been at something of a distance - I listen to it, read about it, I talk about it, but I've had little or no contact with its denizens.

I let people off the hook too easily.

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

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

I can bore for England on the subject of James Bond. But I knew I couldn't do it frivolously; I had to take it very seriously, however much fun I was having. And I had to make myself, you know, absolutely steeped in Bond and in Fleming and that world.

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

The last thing you know about yourself is your effect.

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.

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.

As a novelist, where do you go to tap into memories, and impressions, and sensations? It's usually, in my experience, your early life, before you started thinking of yourself as a writer, because somehow those experiences are unadulterated.

We talked filth for a pleasant half hour.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Sometimes limbo is a tolerable place to be stuck.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

She's half mad and three parts drunk.

Humankind can tolerate only so much rejection.