There is a disconnect between the film Bond and the literary Bond which is their contemporaneity. I don’t suffer from that. – William Boyd
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
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
I have always thought if you are going to make a film, it’s much better to have an original script that will play to film’s strengths. – William Boyd
To live as an artist requires hard work or some extraordinary good fortune to come your way. – William Boyd
In the broad spectrum of the arts, two worlds rarely overlap – the literary world and the world of rock music. – William Boyd
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
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
In some ways, you could argue, television is doing far more interesting work than the movies. It’s more fulfilling. – William Boyd
I tend to admire dead people more than the living. All too often, human reality diminishes the glowing reputation. – William Boyd
It’s strange; when I was younger and people would ask, ‘Where are you from?’, I’d say, ‘West Africa’, which was odd because I’m obviously not African, but it was my home. – William Boyd
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
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
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
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
What’s important to me is that all of my books are in print – and, in a way, that becomes the challenge, not winning this prize or getting that review. It’s that the work is there, and you can walk into many bookshops throughout the world and buy it. – William Boyd
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