Quotes from William Boyd

From time to time Eva would venture on deck to gaze at the grey sky,the grey turbulent water and the grey ships with their belching smoke stacks butting and smashing onward through the waves and jagged swells - disappearing in explosions of wintry spume from time to time - gamely making for the British Isles

What did Shakespeare say? When sorrows come, they come not as single spies – " "— But in battalions.

When sorrows come, they come not as single spies – " "— But in battalions.

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.

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.

Hot crumpets with butter and jam - what could be more ambrosial?

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.

any man over forty who deliberately combs his hair forward in a child's fringe has something suspect about him

I was at that level of inebriation - that hinge, that crux, that ridge - where you can decide to proceed or step back. Red warning lights were flashing on the control panel but the aeroplane was not yet in a screaming death-dive.

Loss adjusters are noble men who frustrate and negate the bland promises of insurance. We act out of the great unbending principles in life: nothing is sure, nothing is certain, nothing is free, nothing is forever. It is a noble calling.

She was happy. Her father had always told her to make sure and recognise that state when it arrived, and acknowledge it. 'It's like money in the bank, old girl', he would say ...

Ben has been a discreet and true friend, given he was an usher at my wedding. I tried to explain the situation vis-à-vis Lottie but he didn't want to hear. 'I don't care, Logan. You live your life and I'll live mine. I won't judge you? just as long as you're happy. I'd hope you'd do the same for me.' I assured him I would.

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

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.

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

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.

What cannot be avoided, must be welcomed.

but you're giving a very good impression of a lovelorn fool pining for his girl.

Any fool can "obey" an order,' Hamo said, darkly. 'The clever thing is to interpret it.

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.

what is it about me and basements? Why do I like the semi-subterranean life?

David Gascoyne once told me that the only point of keeping a journal was to concentrate of the personal, the diurnal minutiae, and forget the great significant events in the world at large.

We don't sense mistakes coming, there's this crucial unforeseen factor to them. 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.

I wasn't feeling grief: that hellish chest-crammed agony you feel - but some portion of my brain activated by the memory decided to trigger the tear ducts