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Dignity was the first quality to be abandoned when the heart took over the running of human affairs.

William Boyd

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William Boyd
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: March 7
Author
Film Director
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Seattle
Washington
Human
Abandoned
Humans
Affairs
First
Affair
Heart
Dignity
Took
Quality
Running
Firsts

More quotes by William Boyd

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I have this lock of hair that keeps falling across my forehead. It drives me mad.
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I know many older writers who were very successful and whose books are now out of print, so you have to go to antiquarian booksellers to buy their fifth or eighth novel or whatever it is.
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I have to start my real life soon, before I die of boredom and frustration.
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In the broad spectrum of the arts, two worlds rarely overlap - the literary world and the world of rock music.
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In some ways, you could argue, television is doing far more interesting work than the movies. It's more fulfilling.
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I have teken refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquility in certainty but in permanently suspended judgement.
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We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.
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There are things in life we don't understand, and when we meet them, all we can do is let them alone.
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We talked filth for a pleasant half hour.
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There's a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain.
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The last thing you know about yourself is your effect.
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There is a disconnect between the film Bond and the literary Bond which is their contemporaneity. I don't suffer from that.
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We never love anyone. Not really. We only love our idea of another person. It is some conception of our own that we love. We love ourselves, in fact.
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Humankind can tolerate only so much rejection.
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It's true: lives do drift apart for no obvious reason. We're all busy people,we can't spend our time simply trying to stay in touch. The test of a friendship is if it can weather these inevitable gaps.
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When it's mutual, a man and a woman know, instinctively, wordlessly. They may do nothing about it, but the knowledge of that shared desire is out there in the world - as obvious as neon, saying: I want you, I want you, I want you.
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It's amazing how sudden the effect is - it must be the result of a deep atavistic mating urge buried inside us. A glance and you think: 'Yes, this is the one, this one is right for me.' Every instinct in your body seems to sing in unison.
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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.
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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.
William Boyd
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We all possess, like it or not, the people we know, and are possessed by them in turn.
William Boyd