William Boyd > Quotes

“Naturally – she's an actress." He laughed wryly to himself. "Complications. Oh, yes." The doctor reflected and then said, "I always think a life without complications isn't really a life, you know. In life things go wrong, nothing stays the same and there's nothing you can do about it. Friends betray you, family is a nightmare, lovers are fickle. This is the norm, no?" He smiled to himself, as if remembering something pertinent. "What kind of a world would it be where nothing ever went wrong, where everything stayed the same, life followed a designated path – family was adorable, friends and lovers were faithful and true?" He paused. "You know, I don't think I'd like that kind of a world. We're made for complications, we human beings. Anyway, such a perfect world could never exist – at least not on this small planet.”
― William Boyd, Love Is Blind: A novel

“I chided her gently, reminding her that 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.”
― William Boyd

“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.”
― William Boyd, Trio

“When faith has died we must paint the colours on the sky”
― William Boyd

“Memory is a dog that wants to please its master.”
― William Boyd, Gabriel's Moon

“He could sense his body flagging even at the modest efforts he demanded of it. The cost of living a long time.
Getting tired.
Maybe this was the human consolation, that when you reach such a state of increasing physical incapacity or difficulty, you begin to welcome death- the end of the daily struggle, the embrace of oblivion. Then he banished these morbid thoughts.”
― William Boyd, The Romantic

“That's all your life amounts to in the end: the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck you experience . . . Tot it up -- look at the respective piles. There's nothing you can do about it: nobody shares it out, allocates it to this side or that, it just happens.”
― William Boyd

“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.”
― William Boyd

“I've no idea what I left behind. Wrong – you know exactly what you left behind. What you don't know is what you'll discover when you go back.”
― William Boyd

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

“Take it off at once. I'll lend you another. School ties are for schoolboys and schoolmasters. No grown man should be seen dead in a school tie. Same goes for regimental and club ties. Appalling bad taste."

William Boyd Armadillo”
― William Boyd

“Ma non è forse così che va la vita, nella maggior parte dei casi? Si rifiuta di adeguarsi ai nostri bisogni, alle esigenze narrative che riteniamo essenziali per dare un senso al tempo che trascorriamo su questa Terra.”
― William Boyd, Una dolce carezza

“A fascinating and candid coming-of-age novelised-memoir, seasoned with phenomenal recall and a perfectly-pitched tone of voice. Wholly beguiling.”
― William Boyd

“More and more he came to see memory as elusive and tricky , and it was surprisingly malleable and transforming, as if it wanted to be pleasing rather than accurate, desirous of giving a version of the past that conformed with what he WANTED the past to be, rather than what it had actually been. He found that he was beginning to mistrust his memory.”
― William Boyd, The Romantic

“Then she changed the subject and asked about Jochen abd how his day had been and had he said anything amusing, so I told her, all the while sensing a kind of weakening in my bowels - as if I needed to shit - provoked by a sudden and growing worry about what was lying up ahead for me and a small nagging fear that I wouldn't be able to cope.”
― William Boyd