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

William Boyd

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William Boyd
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: March 7
Author
Film Director
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Seattle
Washington
People
Admire
Tend
Dead
Living
Often
Diminishes
Reality
Glowing
Human
Diminish
Humans
Reputation

More quotes by William Boyd

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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.
William Boyd
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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.
William Boyd
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Humankind can tolerate only so much rejection.
William Boyd
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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.
William Boyd
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We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.
William Boyd
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I have to start my real life soon, before I die of boredom and frustration.
William Boyd
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The last thing you know about yourself is your effect.
William Boyd
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In some ways, you could argue, television is doing far more interesting work than the movies. It's more fulfilling.
William Boyd
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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.
William Boyd
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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.
William Boyd
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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.
William Boyd
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The last thing we ever learn about ourselves is our effect.
William Boyd
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I have this lock of hair that keeps falling across my forehead. It drives me mad.
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
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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.
William Boyd
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Do we change every time we have a new encounter? Are we endlessly mutable? I think these are fascinating questions: it's a rich vein to tap, and I don't think I have exhausted it fully yet.
William Boyd
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I let people off the hook too easily.
William Boyd
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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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Dignity was the first quality to be abandoned when the heart took over the running of human affairs.
William Boyd
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To live as an artist requires hard work or some extraordinary good fortune to come your way.
William Boyd