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.

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...

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...

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.

To live as an artist requires hard work or some extraordinary good fortune to come your way.

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...

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.

In some ways, you could argue, television is doing far more interesting work than the movies. It's more fulfilling.

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,...