Top 18 William Boyd Quotes

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.

I let people off the hook too easily.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The last thing you know about yourself is your effect.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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