William Boyd
William Boyd
William Boyd, CBEis a British novelist and screenwriter...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 March 1952
lasts effects
The last thing we learn about ourselves is our effect.
filth half hours
We talked filth for a pleasant half hour.
self individual form
We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.
people turns possessed
We all possess, like it or not, the people we know, and are possessed by them in turn.
tree world growing
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.
lines nuance film
Film is a medium of clear lines and broad strikes - which can be fantastic - but compared to the subtleties and nuances of a novel, it doesn't even get close.
hard-work artist way
To live as an artist requires hard work or some extraordinary good fortune to come your way.
suffering film
There is a disconnect between the film Bond and the literary Bond which is their contemporaneity. I don't suffer from that.
lasts about-yourself knows
The last thing you know about yourself is your effect.
absolutely bore england fleming however james knew subject
I can bore for England on the subject of James Bond. But I knew I couldn't do it frivolously; I had to take it very seriously, however much fun I was having. And I had to make myself, you know, absolutely steeped in Bond and in Fleming and that world.
early experience life somehow tap thinking
As a novelist, where do you go to tap into memories, and impressions, and sensations? It's usually, in my experience, your early life, before you started thinking of yourself as a writer, because somehow those experiences are unadulterated.
human
Human beings are interested in the human condition.
becomes books buy print prize throughout walk work
What's important to me is that all of my books are in print - and, in a way, that becomes the challenge, not winning this prize or getting that review. It's that the work is there, and you can walk into many bookshops throughout the world and buy it.
apply becoming book industrial inevitable less pressures selling starting time writers wrote year younger
At a time when there's younger writers starting up and it's inevitable that you're becoming less fashionable, at a time when the industrial pressures apply more and more to books, how do you keep a book you wrote 28 years ago selling well year on year? Because it really is getting harder.