William Trevor > Quotes

“I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.”
― William Trevor

“I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.”
― William Trevor

“People run away to be alone,' he said. Some people had to be alone.”
― William Trevor, Love and Summer

“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 and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.”
― William Trevor

“She is embarrassed to be alive and no one on earth can fully console her.”
― William Trevor, The Boarding-House

“People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.”
― William Trevor

“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

“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

“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

“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, The Story of Lucy Gault

“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

“He should in humility have asked her why it was that he was naturally a cuckold, why two women of different temperaments and characters had been inspired to have lovers at his expense. He should be telling her, with the warmth of her body warming his, that his second wife had confessed to greater sexual pleasure when she remembered that she was deceiving him.”
― William Trevor

“Shame isn't bad, her voice from somewhere else insists. Nor the humility that is its gift.”
― William Trevor, Cheating at Canasta

“The past has no belongings. The past does not obligingly absorb what is not wanted.”
― William Trevor, The Silence in the Garden

“Calamity shaped a life when, long ago, chance was so cruel.”
― William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault

“The more he asked about her childhood at Cloonhill the more Ellie loved her interrogator. No matter how strange he still sometimes seemed, she felt as if all her life she had known him. The past he talked about himself became another part of her: The games he had played alone, the untidy rooms of the house he described, the parties given, the pictures painted. Being with him in the woods at Lyre, where the air was cold and the trees imposed a gloomy darkness, or walking among the monks' graves, or being with him anywhere, telling or listening, was for Ellie more than friendship, or living, had ever been before.”
― William Trevor, Love and Summer

“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

“The flies of some other summer darkening its windowsills.”
― 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 were when you were part of it, with your childhood, with your simplicity then.”
― William Trevor, Love and Summer

“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, The Story of Lucy Gault

“I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. 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. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art.”
― 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 a piece of misinformation.”
― William Trevor

“All this occupied his thoughts when he revisited the places of his war. Tramping over soil fed by the blood of men he had led and whose faces now stirred in his memory, it was his wife's response that came - as if in compensation for too little said before - when he wondered why his wandering had led him back to these old battlefields: in his sixty-ninth year he was establishing his survivor's status.”
― William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault

“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, After Rain

“You can’t apply academic rules to art of any kind. As soon as you begin to have rules, you begin to say, “Well, it works like this: A plus B equals C,” and then you’re absolutely, perfectly lost. You have to take the chance! You’re gambling all the time, sometimes with no idea if a story works. But the alarming thing is in the teaching of literature, laying down what the writer was doing. If you can see through it like that, the writing is no good. You can’t see through Dickens and Conrad.
It’s a mystery how it’s done, even to the person doing it. If you think you know, you’re in deep, deep trouble. It’s rather like a born athlete analyzing: if you have a baseball player who can tell you exactly how he does it, then he’s not telling the truth; he doesn’t know. And I think once you lose touch with that, and believe you’re in charge, you could lose touch with the whole business of writing fiction.
It’s an endless struggle to fool yourself. Just get going, that’s the important thing.”
― William Trevor

“A child in London asked her father what autumn was, having heard it spoken of these days, and the father in explanation said it was a season, though not a major one. In cities, this father said, you did not feel autumn so much, not as you felt the heat of summer or the bite of winter air, or even the slush of spring. He said that, and then the next day sent for the child and said he had been talking nonsense. 'Autumn is on now,' he said. 'You can see it in the parks,' and he took his child for a nature walk.”
― William Trevor, The Love Department

“He was an old hand at the Camp now, his hollow countenance and the intensity of his averted gaze familiar to all who came and went around him. Some had carried to other camps a description of his lanky, quiet presence, had spoken of his strangeness, his regular, lone attendance before the chapel statue. He had made no friends, but in his duties was conscientious and persevering and reliable, known for such qualities to the officers who commanded him. He had dug latrines, metalled roads, adequately performed cookhouse duties, followed instructions as to the upkeep of equipment, and was the first to volunteer when volunteers were called for. That he bore his torment with fortitude was known to no one.”
― William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault

“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

“It was always the same: everywhere there were the hard-hearted who pretended an interest, who began a conversation and then, their cadging over, walked away.”
― William Trevor, Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel

“Would he ever, he wondered, escape from people who banged on the doors he locked to demand his egress?”
― William Trevor, The Boarding-House