William Trevor Quotes

• I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.

  William Trevor

  Writing, People, Needs

  54 Copy quote

• I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.

  William Trevor

  Writing

  47 Copy quote

• Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.

  William Trevor

  Life, Pieces, Matter

  William Trevor (1992). “Two Lives: Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria”, Penguin Group USA

  20 Copy quote

• I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment.

  William Trevor

  Believe, Writing, Knowing

  34 Copy quote

• By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

  William Trevor

  Writing, Character, Knowing

  36 Copy quote

• Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn't do that. That is for me, and I shall do it.

  William Trevor

  Memories, Ifs

  William Trevor (2011). “The Story of Lucy Gault”, p.119, Penguin UK

  43 Copy quote

• As the surface of the seashore rocks were pitted by by the waves and gathered limpets that further disguised what lay beneath, so time made truth of what appeared to be. The days that passed, in becoming weeks, still did not disturb the surface an assumption had created. The weather of a beautiful summer continued with neither sign nor hint that credence had been misplaced. The single sandal found among the rocks became a sodden image of death; and as the keening on the pier at Kilauran traditionally marked distres brought by the sea, so did silence at Lahardane.

  William Trevor

  Beautiful, Summer, Rocks

  William Trevor (2011). “The Story of Lucy Gault”, p.36, Penguin UK

  29 Copy quote

• He traveled in order to come home.

  William Trevor

  Home, Order, America

  14 Copy quote

• My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.

  William Trevor

  Fiction, May, Aspect

  "William Trevor: the keen-eyed chronicler" by Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. August 1, 2009.

  30 Copy quote

• As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.

  William Trevor

  Distance, Writing, Thinking

  17 Copy quote

• The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.

  William Trevor

  Thinking, Imagination, Understanding

  William Trevor (1999). “Death in Summer”, p.144, Penguin

  17 Copy quote

• There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

  William Trevor

  Pain, Fiction, Elements

  William Trevor (1999). “Death in Summer”, p.145, Penguin

  12 Copy quote

• People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.

  William Trevor

  Writing, People, Inarticulate

  14 Copy quote

• The same applies to any artist; we are the tools and instruments of our talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we’re watching, and dealing with.

  William Trevor

  Artist, Tools, Outsiders

  11 Copy quote

• People run away to be alone,' he said. Some people had to be alone.

  William Trevor

  Running, People, Running Away

  William Trevor (2009). “Love and Summer”, p.172, Penguin UK

  7 Copy quote

• I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you'll find a dozen or so who are neither.

  William Trevor

  Inspiring, Mothers Day, Motherhood

  William Trevor (1999). “Death in Summer”, p.145, Penguin

  13 Copy quote

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