William Trevor Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

He traveled in order to come home.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Calamity shaped a life when, long ago, chance was so cruel.