As a novelist, where do you go to tap into memories, and impressions, and sensations? It’s usually, in my experience, your early life, before you started thinking of yourself as a writer, because somehow those experiences are unadulterated. William Boyd Read Quote
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 Read Quote
I can bore for England on the subject of James Bond. But I knew I couldn’t do it frivolously; I had to take it very seriously, however much fun I was having. And I had to make myself, you know, absolutely steeped in Bond and in Fleming and that world. William Boyd Read Quote
Even though I’ve been an avid consumer of contemporary music since my early teens, the world of rock music has always been at something of a distance – I listen to it, read about it, I talk about it, but I’ve had little or no contact with its denizens. William Boyd Read Quote
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. William Boyd Read Quote
At a time when there’s younger writers starting up and it’s inevitable that you’re becoming less fashionable, at a time when the industrial pressures apply more and more to books, how do you keep a book you wrote 28 years ago selling well year on year? Because it really is getting harder. William Boyd Read Quote
