Top 60 William Boyd Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I have to start my real life soon, before I die of boredom and frustration.”

— William Boyd

2. “Sometimes limbo is a tolerable place to be stuck.”

— William Boyd

3. “What cannot be avoided, must be welcomed.”

— William Boyd

4. “She’s half mad and three parts drunk.”

— William Boyd

5. “However long your stay on this small planet lasts, and whatever happens during it, the most important thing is that-from time to time-you feel life’s sweet caress.”

— William Boyd

6. “I let people off the hook too easily.”

— William Boyd

7. “Everything in life is a bit odd, when you come to think of it.”

— William Boyd

8. “We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.”

— William Boyd

9. “The last thing we learn about ourselves is our effect.”

— William Boyd

10. “There are things in life we don’t understand, and when we meet them, all we can do is let them alone.”

— William Boyd

11. “When sorrows come, they come not as single spies – “ “ – But in battalions.”

— William Boyd

12. “When faith has died we must paint the colours on the sky.”

— William Boyd

13. “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

14. “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

15. “In the broad spectrum of the arts, two worlds rarely overlap – the literary world and the world of rock music.”

— William Boyd

16. “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.”

— William Boyd

17. “She felt weary and careworn, in the way one often does before the big job of work is tackled; that sense of premature or projected exhaustion that is the breeding ground of all procrastination.”

— William Boyd

18. “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

19. “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

20. “Death is hidden away from us in our century – it’s become something secret that happens in hospitals or morgues. We only see it on a screen – filtered, lit, factitious.”

— William Boyd

21. “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

22. “Humankind can tolerate only so much rejection.”

— William Boyd

23. “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

24. “There’s a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain.”

— William Boyd

25. “As I write this I feel that draining, hollowing helplessness that genuine love for another person produces in you. It’s at these moments that we know we are going to die.”

— William Boyd

26. “I have this lock of hair that keeps falling across my forehead. It drives me mad.”

— William Boyd

27. “I have teken refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquility in certainty but in permanently suspended judgement.”

— William Boyd

28. “So I found myself asking the question: what is the opposite of a mistake? And I realised there wasn’t a word, in fact, precisely because a mistake always arises from best intentions that go awry. You can’t set out to make a mistake. Mistakes happen – there’s nothing we can do about them.”

— William Boyd

29. “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

30. “Gabriel thought maps should be banned. They gave the world an order and reasonableness which it did not possess.”

— William Boyd

31. “It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.” Isaac Asimov.”

— William Boyd

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

— William Boyd

33. “Dignity was the first quality to be abandoned when the heart took over the running of human affairs.”

— William Boyd

34. “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.”

— William Boyd

35. “Romer’s idea, like all good ideas, was very simple: false information can be just as useful, influential, as telling, transforming or as damaging as true information.”

— William Boyd

36. “But you can be too intelligent, I said. Sometimes it’s not an asset it’s a curse.”

— William Boyd

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

— William Boyd

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

— William Boyd

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

— William Boyd

40. “Those of us who have the luck to enjoy good health forget about this vast parallel universe of the unwell-their daily miseries, their banal ordeals. Only when you cross that frontier into the world of ill-health do you recognize its quiet, massive presence, its brooding permanence.”

— William Boyd

41. “Isn’t this how life turns out, more often than not? It refuses to conform to your needs – the narrative needs that you feel are essential to give rough shape to your time on this earth.”

— William Boyd

42. “Real life is never, never as simple as a movie.”

— William Boyd

43. “I know part of my sorrow is just disguised self-pity, I needed that exchange and I worry how I’ll cope without it and whether I can replace it – if only it were as easy as buying a new dog.”

— William Boyd

44. “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

45. “This is vexing: I feel in a kind of limbo – an author but not truly an author, true authorship being conferred by having a book physically published – a thing you can hold in your hand, purchase in a bookshop.”

— William Boyd

46. “She bought a pint of whiskey and woke to discover that she had managed to construct a presentable hangover for herself on the morning of 1 January.”

— William Boyd

47. “Is it possible to live reasonably without lying? Do lies form the natural foundation of all human relationships, the thread that stitches our individual selves together?”

— William Boyd

48. “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

49. “That’s all your 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. Tot it up – look at the respective piles. There’s nothing you can do about it: nobody shares it out, allocates it to this one or that, it just happens. We must quietly suffer the laws of man’s condition, as Montaigne says.”

— William Boyd

50. “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