William Trevor

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

— William Trevor

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

— William Trevor

“Miss Clerricot blushes most charmingly and raises a hand to cover a portion of her countenance. It is a shame, this ill-feeling…

— William Trevor

“I have never believed in the axiom that a writer should first and foremost write about what he knows. I think it’s…

— William Trevor

“You can’t apply academic rules to art of any kind. As soon as you begin to have rules, you begin to say,…

— William Trevor

“He was an old hand at the Camp now, his hollow countenance and the intensity of his averted gaze familiar to all…

— William Trevor

“It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts…

— William Trevor

“Would he ever, he wondered, escape from people who banged on the doors he locked to demand his egress?”

— William Trevor

“Studdy was thinking that the creature was an animal; he was saying to himself that it was surely in error that she…

— William Trevor

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

— William Trevor

“The past has no belongings. The past does not obligingly absorb what is not wanted.”

— William Trevor

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

— William Trevor

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

— William Trevor

“He was new to London in those days, and he had not liked it. He had not cared for the intensity of…

— William Trevor

“Memory in its ordinary way summoned harvested fields, and haycocks and autumn hedges, the first of the fuchsia, the last of the…

— William Trevor

“Concealed from the public eye, snug within his coffin, Mr Bird looked as he had looked in life. Despite his size and…

— William Trevor

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that…

— William Trevor

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

— William Trevor

“When Mr Bird had written his will and had read it over he became aware that he was laughing. He heard the…

— William Trevor

As the surface of the seashore rocks were pitted by by the waves and gathered limpets that further disguised what lay beneath,…

— William Trevor

“He should in humility have asked her why it was that he was naturally a cuckold, why two women of different temperaments…

— William Trevor

“All this occupied his thoughts when he revisited the places of his war. Tramping over soil fed by the blood of men…

— William Trevor

“Her tranquillity is their astonishment. For that they come, to be amazed again that such peace is there: all they have heard,…

— William Trevor

“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…

— William Trevor

Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn't do that. That is for…

— William Trevor