Literary Birthday – 7 March – William Boyd

William Boyd Quotes

1. We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.
2. 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 what you can do in a written paragraph.
3. There’s a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain.
4. Writing a film – more precisely, adapting a book into a film – is basically a relentless series of compromises. . . It has been said before but is worth reiterating: writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a film is like swimming in the bath.
5. Dignity was the first quality to be abandoned when the heart took over the running of human affairs.
6. True learning only occurs when you love the subject you are studying and then the acquiring of knowledge is effortless because it is also a pleasure.
7. No human being is entirely innocent.
8. I love to use these phrases – ‘with the greatest respect’, ‘in all modest’, ‘I humbly submit’ – which in fact always imply the complete opposite.
9. Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary – it is the respective proportion of those two categories that make that life appear interesting or humdrum.

William Boyd is an award-winning British novelist and screenwriter. His historical novels include A Good Man in Africa, An Ice-Cream War, and Any Human Heart. A Good Man in Africa was the winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Prize. An Ice Cream War was shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize and was the winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. He also wrote the speculative memoir Nat Tate: an American Artist. His 15th novel, Love is Blind was published in 2018. Trio, appeared in 2020 and his 17th novel, The Romantic was published in 2022. His stories have been published around the world and have been translated into over 30 languages. (Click here for his screenwriting works.) He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has been presented with honorary Doctorates in Literature from the universities of St. Andrews, Stirling, Glasgow, and Dundee. He was awarded the CBE in 2005.

Image via literary agents/credit Trevor Leighton

by Amanda Patterson

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