William Boyd (writer) Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

We all want to be happy, and we're all going to die... You might say those are the only two unchallengeably true facts that apply to every human being on this planet.

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

William Boyd
It was like picking a scab off a sore; he actually wanted scar tissue — it would be quite wrong to try and forget, to blank it all out. Every fraught memory that lurked here had played its role: everything he was today was an indirect result of the life he had led then. It confirmed the rightness of every step he had taken.

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

William Boyd
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
I have taken refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquility in certainty but in permanently suspended judgement.

William Boyd
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
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
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
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.

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

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

William Boyd
We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.

William Boyd