William Boyd famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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.
-- William Boyd

#Ideas #Facts #Persons
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.
-- William Boyd

#Weather #People #True Life
Dignity was the first quality to be abandoned when the heart took over the running of human affairs.
-- William Boyd

#Running #Heart #Quality
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.
-- William Boyd

#Humanity #Kitchen #Spy
I have teken refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquility in certainty but in permanently suspended judgement.
-- William Boyd

#Judgement #Doctrine #Tranquility
The last thing we learn about ourselves is our effect.
-- William Boyd

#Lasts
She's half mad and three parts drunk.
-- William Boyd

#Mad #Drunk #Half
We talked filth for a pleasant half hour.
-- William Boyd

#Filth #Half #Hours
The last thing you know about yourself is your effect.
-- William Boyd

#Lasts #About Yourself #Effects
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.
-- William Boyd

#Bereavement #Age #Boards
I have to start my real life soon, before I die of boredom and frustration.
-- William Boyd

#Real #Frustration #Boredom
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.
-- William Boyd

#Art #Book #Writing
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.
-- William Boyd

#Men #Desire #World
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.
-- William Boyd

#Thinking #Body #Instinct
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.
-- William Boyd

#Tree #World #Growing
There's a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain.
-- William Boyd

#Certain #Novel
The last thing we ever learn about ourselves is our effect.
-- William Boyd

#Lasts #Effects
To live as an artist requires hard work or some extraordinary good fortune to come your way.
-- William Boyd

#Hard Work #Artist #Way
We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.
-- William Boyd

#Self #Individual #Form
I let people off the hook too easily.
-- William Boyd

#People #Hook
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.
-- William Boyd

#Views #Acting #Cameras
There are things in life we don't understand, and when we meet them, all we can do is let them alone.
-- William Boyd

#Things In Life #Can Do
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.
-- William Boyd

#Lines #Nuance #Film
My novels are often about people who are in love or attracted to each other.
-- William Boyd

#People #Novel
In some ways, you could argue, television is doing far more interesting work than the movies. It's more fulfilling.
-- William Boyd

#Interesting #Television #Way
Sometimes limbo is a tolerable place to be stuck.
-- William Boyd

#Sometimes #Stuck #Limbo
Humankind can tolerate only so much rejection.
-- William Boyd

#Rejection #Tolerate #Humankind

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