Quotes from William Boyd

The view backward showed you all the twists and turns your life had taken, all the contingencies and chances, the random elements of good luck and bad luck that made up one person's existence.

That's ally our 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.

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.

Looking over the beach and the ocean as the sun begins to drop down in the west, a strange sense of pride: pride in all I've done and lived through, proud to think of the thousands of people I've met and known and the few I've loved.

you can't make these unilateral pacts with life. You can't say: that's it, my emotions are securely locked away, now I'm impregnable, safe from the world's cruelties and disappointments. Better to take them on, come what may, I said, see what strength you have within you.

No, no - you have to understand, Lysander, here in Vienna, in this ramshackle empire of ours, suicide is a perfectly reasonable course of action. Everyone will know your true feelings and why you had no choice but to do it - no one will condemn you or blame you.

That moment when you realize - quite rationally, quite unemotionally - that the world in the not-so-far-distant future will not contain you: that the trees you planted will continue growing but you will not be there to see them.

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.

Maybe this is the answer - maybe this is how to find true contentment - to live your life within confined horizons. To set modest goals, achievable ambitions. Not all of us can manage it, alas.

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.

Real life is never, never as simple as a movie.

It was pleasant - and the sense of otherness was nice, that there were two people involved in this process, that we were each giving something to the other.

A vague worry has started alongside my self-satisfaction: I have established, with amazing rapidity, a reputation for maniacal, self-destructive courage.

I watched the day slip into night, noting the wondrous tonal transformations of the sunset on its dimmer switch, how blood-orange can shade imperceptibly into ice-blue on the knife-edge of the horizon, listening to the sea's interminable call for silence - shh, shh, shh.

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

The air smelt of booze, sweat and cheap perfume - redolent of sex and danger. There was a kind of frontier recklessness about the atmosphere, Bond thought, and recognised its allure.

Bond went back to room 325 and poured himself two fingers of bourbon from his bottle and switched on the television while he waited for Delmont. He watched a game of baseball uncomprehendingly - the Senators versus the Royals - thinking that it made cricket seem exciting.

Describe your state of mine. Insecure. Uncertain. Feverish

Old Testament prophets. 'You savvy dis fetish thing?

Civil time' as the chronologists call it, has always been based on the rotation of the earth. But our sense of 'private' time is innate. Neurologists think that this sense of time, which is always of the present moment, is conditioned by our nervous systems. As we grow older, our nervous systems decelerate and our sense of personal time dawdles correspondingly...This is why our lives seem to pass more quicly as we age.

Ich bin für gute Unterhaltung, feuchtfröhliche Abende, Intimität, vins rouges en carafe, Lesen, relative Einsamkeit, Straßenbekanntschaften … Ich bin für die europäischen Verworrenheiten, die unergründlichen und mannigfachen Schichtungen der Alten Welt, für den Norden, für die Welt der Gedanken. Ich bin für das Hôtel de la Louisiane.

When the going gets tough, the tough gets going.

was a routine, now, and one should never underestimate the importance of routine in a person's life: routine allowed everything else to seem more exciting and impromptu.

All the itch and clutter of the world, its bother and fuss, its nagging pettiness, can wear you down so easily. And this is why I like the beach ...