William Trevor Quotes
17 quotes
in 275 categories
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Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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He traveled in order to come home.
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The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.
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I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment.
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People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.
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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…
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I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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People run away to be alone,' he said. Some people had to be alone.
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I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.
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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…
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