117 Quotes by william boyd

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.

She felt weary and careworn, in the way one often does before the big job of work is tackled; that sense of premature or projected exhaustion that is the breeding ground of all procrastination.

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.

It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.” Isaac Asimov.

Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary – it is the respective proportion of those two categories that make that life appear interesting or humdrum.

Everything in life is a bit odd, when you come to think of it.

This is vexing: I feel in a kind of limbo – an author but not truly an author, true authorship being conferred by having a book physically published – a thing you can hold in your hand, purchase in a bookshop.

I was at that level of inebriation – that hinge, that crux, that ridge – where you can decide to proceed or step back. Red warning lights were flashing on the control panel but the aeroplane was not yet in a screaming death-dive.

As I write this I feel that draining, hollowing helplessness that genuine love for another person produces in you. It’s at these moments that we know we are going to die.