Quotes from William Trevor

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Shame isn't bad, her voice from somewhere else insists. Nor the humility that is its gift.

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.

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

The flies of some other summer darkening its windowsills.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.