William Trevor Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Shame isn't bad, her voice from somewhere else insists. Nor the humility that is its gift.

William Trevor

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. The flies of some other summer darkening its windowsills.

William Trevor

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

William Trevor

#7. I have never believed in the axiom that a writer should first and foremost write about what he knows. I think it's a piece of misinformation.

William Trevor

#8. They didn't mention the jealousy their love of each other had bred in him, that had flourished into deviousness and cruelty. The pain the day had brought would not easily pass, both were aware of that. And yet it had to be, since it was part of what there was.

William Trevor

#9. Memory in its ordinary way summoned harvested fields, and haycocks and autumn hedges, the first of the fuchsia, the last of the wild sweetpea. It brought the lowing of cattle, old donkeys resting, scampering dogs, and days and places.

William Trevor

#10. The past has no belongings. The past does not obligingly absorb what is not wanted.

William Trevor

#11. I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can't write unless you read.

William Trevor

#12. He traveled in order to come home.

William Trevor

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

William Trevor

#14. But you didn't lose touch with a place when it wasn't there any more, you didn't lose touch with yourself as you were when you were part of it, with your childhood, with your simplicity then.

William Trevor

#15. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more.

William Trevor

#16. She is embarrassed to be alive and no one on earth can fully console her.

William Trevor

#17. 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

#18. Her tranquillity is their astonishment. For that they come, to be amazed again that such peace is there: all they have heard, and still hear now, does not record it. Calamity shaped a life when, long ago, chance was so cruel.

William Trevor

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

William Trevor

#20. 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

#21. 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

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

William Trevor

#23. A person's life isn't orderly ... it runs about all over the place, in and out through time. The present's hardly there; the future doesn't exist. Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.

William Trevor

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

William Trevor

#25. Only the debris of wreckage, and not much of that, was left behind by the sharks who fed on tragedy: the fishermen, too, mourned the death of a living child.

William Trevor