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Top William Boyd Quotes

Browse top 65 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by William Boyd.

Favorite William Boyd Quotes

1. "Maybe we should go by tube', he said.A taxi'll come', she said. 'I'm in no hurry'.She remembered something a woman in Paris had told her once. A woman in her forties, much married, elegant, a little world-weary. There is nothing easier in this world, this woman had claimed, than getting a man to kiss you. Oh really? Eva had said, so how do you do that? Just stand close to a man, the woman has said, very close, as close as you can without touching - he will kiss you in one minute or two. It's inevitable. For them it's like an instinct - they can't resist. Infaillible.So Eva stood close to Romer in the doorway of the shop on Frith Street as he shooted and waved at the passing cars moving down the dark street, hoping one of them might be a taxi.We're out of luck', he said, turning, to find Eva standing very close to him, her face lifted.I'm in no hurry', she said.He reached for her and kissed her." ~ William Boyd
2. "Sometimes limbo is a tolerable place to be stuck." ~ William Boyd
3. "You think it begins to diminish with time, the pain, then it comes back and hits you with a rawness and freshness you had forgotten." ~ William Boyd
4. "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
5. "I experienced a form of grief so intense and pure I thought it would kill me." ~ William Boyd
6. "Looking over the beach and the ocean as the sun begins to drop down in the west, a strange sense of pride: pride in all I've done and lived through, proud to think of the thousands of people I've met and known and the few I've loved." ~ William Boyd
7. "I write - poignantly, in the most heartfelt way - about how I miss her and how I detest my life in this school and she responds with detailed plans for her future life as an archaeologist or philosopher or - new, this - a veterinary surgeon." ~ William Boyd
8. "That's ally our life amounts to in the end: the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck you experience. Everything is explained by that simple formula." ~ William Boyd
9. "We're not ready for it - for people our age to die. We think we're safe for a while, but it's a dream. No one's safe." ~ William Boyd
10. "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." ~ William Boyd
11. "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." ~ William Boyd
12. "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." ~ William Boyd
13. "We talked filth for a pleasant half hour." ~ William Boyd
14. "I have this lock of hair that keeps falling across my forehead. It drives me mad." ~ William Boyd
15. "I tend to admire dead people more than the living. All too often, human reality diminishes the glowing reputation." ~ William Boyd
16. "In some ways, you could argue, television is doing far more interesting work than the movies. It's more fulfilling." ~ William Boyd
17. "My novels are often about people who are in love or attracted to each other." ~ William Boyd
18. "The last thing you know about yourself is your effect." ~ William Boyd
19. "There is a disconnect between the film Bond and the literary Bond which is their contemporaneity. I don't suffer from that." ~ William Boyd
20. "There's a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain." ~ William Boyd
21. "To live as an artist requires hard work or some extraordinary good fortune to come your way." ~ William Boyd
22. "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." ~ William Boyd
23. "I felt shocked and then saddened. life does this to you sometimes - leads you up a path and then drops you in the shit, to mix a metaphor." ~ William Boyd
24. "Maybe this is what life is like - we try to see clearly but what we see is never clear and is never going to be. The more we strive the murkier it becomes. All we are left with are approximations, nuances, multitudes of plausible explanations. Take your pick." ~ William Boyd
25. "Sitting in this small pub with its cool flagged floor, listening to the murmuring voices of the haymakers and the click of dominoes falling, drinking beer here in the midle of summer in England in 1914, he suddenly felt a stillness creep up on him as if he were suffering from a form of mental palsy -- as if time had stopped and the world's turning, also. It was a strange sensation -- that he would be for ever stuck in this late June day in 1914 like a fly in amber -- the past as irrelevant to him as the future. A perfect statis; the most alluring inertia." ~ William Boyd
26. "True learning only occurs when you love the subject you are studying and then the acquiring of knowledge is effortless because it is also a pleasure." ~ William Boyd
27. "Those were the years when I was truly happy. Knowing that is both a blessing and a curse. It's good to acknowledge that you found true happiness in your life - in that sense your life has not been wasted. But to admit that you will never be happy like that again is hard." ~ William Boyd
28. "Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary - it is the respective proportion of those two categories that make that life appear interesting or humdrum." ~ William Boyd
29. "But you can be too intelligent, I said. Sometimes it's not an asset it's a curse." ~ William Boyd
30. "When I think of my youth, he went in, what we took for granted, what we assumed was for ever certain, for ever permanent." ~ William Boyd
31. "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
32. "Are our lives just the aggregate of the lies we've told? ('Lives' - the 'v' is silent.)" ~ William Boyd
33. "A warm sunny evening, the plash and gurgle of the waves in the rock pools, the rush of the cold gin. I thought for the first time of my novel, abandoned, all these years, and I came up, unprompted, with the perfect title. Octet. Octet by Logan Mountstuart. Perhaps I will surprise them all, yet." ~ William Boyd
34. "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
35. "The last thing we learn about ourselves is our effect." ~ William Boyd
36. "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
37. "Dignity was the first quality to be abandoned when the heart took over the running of human affairs." ~ William Boyd
38. "I have teken refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquility in certainty but in permanently suspended judgement." ~ William Boyd
39. "We all possess, like it or not, the people we know, and are possessed by them in turn." ~ William Boyd
40. "It terrifies me, the fragility of these moments in our lives." ~ William Boyd
41. "No human being is entirely innocent" ~ William Boyd
42. "A Horrible thought: could this be the pattern of my life ahead? Every ambition thwarted, every dream stillborn? But a seconds reflection tells me that what I'm currently experiencing is shared by all sentient, suffering human beings, except for the very, very few: the genuinely talented - the odd, rare genius - and, of course, the exceptionally lucky swine." ~ William Boyd
43. "Describe your state of mine. Insecure. Uncertain. Feverish" ~ William Boyd
44. "Ich bin für gute Unterhaltung, feuchtfröhliche Abende, Intimität, vins rouges en carafe, Lesen, relative Einsamkeit, Straßenbekanntschaften … Ich bin für die europäischen Verworrenheiten, die unergründlichen und mannigfachen Schichtungen der Alten Welt, für den Norden, für die Welt der Gedanken. Ich bin für das Hôtel de la Louisiane." ~ William Boyd
45. "Take a look at anyone's life. Take a look at your own. In the long fold catastrophe that makes up your three-score years and ten you will encounter many cusp catastrophes along the way." ~ William Boyd
46. "Why does the sea induce these feelings of transcendence in us? Is it because an unobstructed view of overarching sky meeting endlessly stirring water is as close as we can come on this earth to a visual symbol of the infinite?" ~ William Boyd
47. "Feelings of depression; feelings of frustration; feelings of emptiness in the face of all this randomness - done down by the haphazard, yet again." ~ William Boyd
48. "LOSER! You English lose...I suppose he thought it was the most grievous insult he could hurl. But such a curse doesn't really have any effect on an English person - or a European - it seems to me. We know we're all going to lose in the end so it is deprived of any force as a slur." ~ William Boyd
49. "I felt truly happy for the first time in years. Such moments should be logged and noted." ~ William Boyd
50. "The view backward showed you all the twists and turns your life had taken, all the contingencies and chances, the random elements of good luck and bad luck that made up one person's existence." ~ William Boyd
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The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be."
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Ear
Thin
Hen
Per
Here
Wit
Ally
Ten
Lit
End
Ring
Thou
Hum
Less
Era
King
Novel
Los
Win
Ought
Old
Able
Felt
Cause
Use
Con
Though
Year
Ears
Son
She
Turn
Wing
Moment
Ours
Lives
Luck
Act
Effect
Does
Lose
Chin
Curse
Die
May
Each
Tie
Times
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