William Boyd

“Maybe we should go by tube', he said. A taxi'll come', she said. 'I'm in no hurry'. She remembered something a woman in Paris had told her once. A woman in her forties, much married, elegant...”

“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 wo...”

“When you experience bereavement at a youngish age, you suddenly realise that life is unjust and unfair, that bad things will happen, and you have to take that on board.”

“Even though I've been an avid consumer of contemporary music since my early teens, the world of rock music has always been at something of a distance - I listen to it, read about it, I talk...”

“I tend to admire dead people more than the living. All too often, human reality diminishes the glowing reputation.”

“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, be...”

“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 kn...”

“With film, you have very limited tools to convey subjectivity - voiceover, the camera's point of view, good acting - but even the very best actor in the world is crude by comparison with wha...”

“In some ways, you could argue, television is doing far more interesting work than the movies. It's more fulfilling.”