William Boyd

Literary Birthday – 7 March – William Boyd

Happy Birthday, William Boyd, born 7 March 1952.

Nine 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 a British novelist and screenwriter. His novels include A Good Man in Africa, An Ice-Cream War, and Any Human Heart.

Image via literary agents/credit Trevor Leighton

 by Amanda Patterson

Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: Literary Birthday Calendar

Posted on: 7th March 2016
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