William Trevor Quotes

17 quotes in 275 categories

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

Browse William Trevor Quotes by Category