Quotes from William Boyd

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The last thing we learn about ourselves is our effect.

Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary - it is the respective proportion of those two categories that make that life appear interesting or humdrum.

It terrifies me, the fragility of these moments in our lives.

We talked filth for a pleasant half hour.

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.

Are our lives just the aggregate of the lies we've told? ('Lives' - the 'v' is silent.)

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

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.

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.

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?

She's half mad and three parts drunk.

But you can be too intelligent, I said. Sometimes it's not an asset it's a curse.

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.

Humankind can tolerate only so much rejection.

No human being is entirely innocent

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.

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.