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William Boyd

William Boyd Quotes

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Famous William Boyd Quotes

“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.”

LoveRomance
Book:Restless
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“People come to us...us novelists...looking for information about all the other people in the world; what we're thinking, what we need, what we dream about, what we hate, what makes us tick.... People are opaque, mysterious, even those dearest to us are closed books. If you want to know what people are like, if you want to know what's going on in their heads behind those masks we all wear then read a novel.”

FictionEmpathyNovelsUnderstanding Others
Book:Trio
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“Do you know that feeling? When you meet someone and you know? The sudden hollowing out of your torso, as if your lungs, heart, viscera have gone and the ribs seem to creak like barrel staves under too much pressure. Glimmerings, intimations of the way I felt now had occurred before with Faye Hobhouse, Dagmar - even Huguette. It is, I think, to do with fear: a fear of impotence - not sexual, but of lacking the power or ability to capture the object of your vital passion. A haunting dread that you will never have the chance again, that the moment has passed you by for ever.”

LovePassionFeelingFear Of ImpotencePassed By Chance
Book:The New Confessions
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“It is a clear and dazzling summer’s day in Vienna. You are standing in a skewed pentangle of lemony sunshine at the sharp corner of Augustiner Strasse and Augustinerbastei, across from the opera house, indolently watching the world pass by you, waiting for someone or something to catch and hold your attention, to generate a tremor of interest. There’s a curious frisson in the city’s atmosphere today, almost spring-like, though spring is long gone, but you recognize that slight vernal restlessness in the people going by, that stirring of potential in the air, that possibility of audacity – though what audacities they might be, here in Vienna, who can say? Still, your eyes are open, you are unusually poised, ready for anything – any crumb, any flung coin – that the world might casually toss your way.”

Waiting For Sunrise
Author:William Boyd
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“All film technique, I am convinced (and like many of my theories I am probably alone in adhering to it), originates in dreaming. We could dream slow motion before the moving camera was invented. In our dreams we could cut between parallel actions, we assembled montage shots long before some self-important Russian claimed to show us how. This is where film derives its particular power. It re-creates on screen what has been going on in our unconscious.”

FilmDreamsUnconsciousFilmmakingMontageFilm TechniqueMoving Camera
Book:The New Confessions
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“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.”

WorldTakenPhotographerPhotographArguingContemplatingFamily And FriendsOnly TimeExhibitionsAuthorship
Book:Bamboo
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“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.”

WritingHas BeensArtSaidBookFilmNovelSeaSkillsArt IsSeriesCompromiseCraftsSwimmingBathsRelentlessAdapting
Author:William Boyd
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“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.”

NeedsFeelsHas BeensStillsFactsHumanityCommonOur LivesOne DayStaringKitchenMortalitySpyMeadowsNemesisCommon Humanity
Book:Restless
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