Top 40 William Trevor Quotes
#1. Felicia's Journey by the Irish short-story writer and novelist William Trevor.
Will Schwalbe
#2. I think William Trevor is as good as it gets. Whenever I want a book to do exactly what it says it will, I read him.
Padgett Powell
#3. William Trevor is an author I admire; his stories are subtle and powerful, and beautifully written.
Kim Edwards
#4. I studied the cello for a long time, from when I was little up through college.
Lev Grossman
#5. If there is an authoritarian structure at St. Hill it has been brought into being by the government itself. St. Hill is trying to correct itself. It doesn't know what it's trying to correct because nobody has told it what to correct.
L. Ron Hubbard
#6. We try to explain how we feel, but there aren't always the right words or the words we have fail. But with music, you can hear a piece and say, Yeah, that's it. That's exactly how I feel.
Carrie Arcos
#7. 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
#8. She is embarrassed to be alive and no one on earth can fully console her.
William Trevor
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.
William Trevor
#12. For a person who grew up in the '30s and '40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, 'Here I am, read me.' Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.
Maya Angelou
#13. 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
#14. The noose around a man's neck is tighter than that of his fists
Aaron Ozee
#15. 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
#16. People run away to be alone,' he said. Some people had to be alone.
William Trevor
#17. 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
#18. I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment.
William Trevor
#19. I stole a piece of the chess set on the first film. I took a piece of the treasure out of Bellatrix's vault on this film. And I've taken my wand and I've got my cloak.
Emma Watson
#20. 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
#21. I have wanted women whose very shoes are worth all I have ever possessed.
John Fante
#22. The ancient biblical writings spoke of the husband and wife becoming "one flesh." That did not mean that individuals would lose their identity; it meant that they would enter into each other's lives in a deep and intimate way.
Gary Chapman
#23. Everything's so repressive now - it's the No generation. You can't do anything, you can't eat anything, you have to abstain.
Michael Douglas
#24. 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
#25. Shame isn't bad, her voice from somewhere else insists. Nor the humility that is its gift.
William Trevor
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. When I was in college, there were certain words you couldn't say in front of a girl. Now you can say them, but you can't say 'girl.'
Tom Lehrer
#29. A gold cage is still a cage.
-King David I
Oh, go cry in a bag of money.
-Queen Christina
MaryJanice Davidson
#30. The flies of some other summer darkening its windowsills.
William Trevor
#31. The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.
William Trevor
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. The important thing is to take the bricklayer and make him understand that he's building a home, not just laying bricks.
Herb Kelleher
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. The past has no belongings. The past does not obligingly absorb what is not wanted.
William Trevor
#38. I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can't write unless you read.
William Trevor
#40. People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.
William Trevor
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