Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best William Boyd Quotes. Let’s look at these pieces of wisdom. We definitely have something to learn from them!
1
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.
2
To live as an artist requires hard work or some extraordinary good fortune to come your way.
3
I don’t think they’ll ever make a retro Bond.
4
My novels are often about people who are in love or attracted to each other.
5
In the broad spectrum of the arts, two worlds rarely overlap – the literary world and the world of rock music.
6
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.
7
Human beings are interested in the human condition.
8
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.
9
There’s a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain.
10
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.
11
I tend to admire dead people more than the living. All too often, human reality diminishes the glowing reputation.
12
I have this lock of hair that keeps falling across my forehead. It drives me mad.
13
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.
14
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.
15
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.
