Are our lives just the aggregate of the lies we've told? ('Lives' - the 'v' is silent.)

— William Boyd

A warm sunny evening, the plash and gurgle of the waves in the rock pools, the rush of the cold gin. I thought for the first time of my novel, abandoned, all these years, and I came up, unprompted, with the perfect title. Octet. Octet by Logan John Stuart. Perhaps I will surprise them all, yet.

— William Boyd

He needed the security of other bodies.

— William Boyd

Hot crumpets with butter and jam - what could be more ambrosial?

— William Boyd

It was pleasant - and the sense of otherness was nice, that there were two people involved in this process, that we were each giving something to the other.

— William Boyd

I walked out this evening to the bottom of the garden and smoked a cigarette. Last week I planted an Acer in the furthest bed from the house, in honor of our new baby. The sapling is as tall as me and, by all accounts, it can grow forty feet tall. So, in thirty years time, if we're still here I can come back and see this tree in its maturity. But the thought depresses me: in thirty years' time I'll be in my mid-sixties and I realize that these forward projections that you make, so unrelentingly, in your life are beginning to run out. Suppose I'd said in forty years' time? That would be pushing it, Fifty? I'll probably be gone by then. Sixty? Dead and buried, for sure. Thanks to Christ I didn't plant an oak. Is that a good definition of marking the aging 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

Lysander saw that they were displaying all the timeworn and conventional feints and poor disguises of lovers meeting in a public place and hoping the real nature of their relationship would be invisible.

— William Boyd

Maybe we should go by tube', he said. A taxi'll come', she said. 'I'm in no hurry'. She remembered something a woman in Paris had told her once. A woman in her forties, much married, elegant, a little world-weary. There is nothing easier in this world, this woman had claimed, than getting a man to kiss you. Oh, really? Eva had said, so how do you do that? Just stand close to a man, the woman has said, very close, as close as you can without touching - he will kiss you in one minute or two. It's inevitable. For them, it's like an instinct - they can't resist. Infallible. So Eva stood close to Rome in the doorway of the shop on Faith Street as he shot and waved at the passing cars moving down the dark street, hoping one of them might be a taxi. We're out of luck', he said, turning, to find Eva standing very close to him, her face lifted. I'm in no hurry', she said. He reached for her and kissed her.

— William Boyd

Meeting Hettie again made him achingly conscious once more of the irrefutable nature of his obsession with her. Obsession - or love? Or was it something more unhealthy - a kind of craving, an addiction?

— William Boyd

The wounded, the incomplete, the unbalanced, the malfunctioning, the ill seeks each other out: like attracted to like.

— William Boyd