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.

There is a disconnect between the film Bond and the literary Bond which is their contemporaneity. I don't suffer from that.

I don't think they'll ever make a retro Bond.

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.

I have this lock of hair that keeps falling across my forehead. It drives me mad.

My novels are often about people who are in love or attracted to each other.

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.

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.

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.

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

Human beings are interested in the human condition.

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.