Top 30 Trevanian Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Irony is Fate’s most common figure of speech.”

— Trevanian

2. “No one really likes Switzerland, except those who prefer cleanliness to life.”

— Trevanian

3. “Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double-entry accounting.”

— Trevanian

4. “The rope connecting two men on a mountain is more than nylon protection; it is an organic thing that transmits subtle messages of intent and disposition from man to man; it is an extension of the tactile senses, a psychological bond, a wire along which currents of communication flow.”

— Trevanian

5. “We all desire to be understood, but no one enjoys being obvious.”

— Trevanian

6. “Who must do the harsh things? He who can.”

— Trevanian

7. “Pass through knowledge to arrive at simplicity.”

— Trevanian

8. “Do not fall into the error of the artist who boasts of twenty years experience in his craft while in fact he has had only one year of experience – twenty times.”

— Trevanian

9. “Generalization is flawed thinking only when applied to individuals. It is the most accurate way to describe the mass, the Wad. And yours is a democracy, a dictatorship of the Wad.”

— Trevanian

10. “Confession is good for the soul, it empties the spirit making more room for sin.”

— Trevanian

11. “Niceness is an overrated quality. Being nice is how a man pays his way into a party if he hasn’t the guts to be tough or the class to be brilliant.”

— Trevanian

12. “But we are in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colorless, boring – but inevitably victorious.”

— Trevanian

13. “It is a truism of American politics that no man who can win an election deserves to.”

— Trevanian

14. “You can gain experience, if you are careful to avoid empty redundancy. Do not fall into the error of the artisan who boasts of twenty years experience in craft while in fact he has had only one year of experience–twenty times. And never resent the advantage of experience your elders have. Recall that they have paid for this experience in the coin of life, and have emptied a purse that cannot be refilled.”

— Trevanian

15. “The Trevanian Buff is a strange and wonderful creature: an outsider, a natural elitist, not so much a cynic as an idealist mugged by reality, not just one of those who march to a different drummer, but the solo drummer in a parade of one.”

— Trevanian

16. “Of course these gifts were reckless extravagances for a family that was never more than a couple of dollars and a few days away from hunger, but that’s how poor people cope with being marooned in poverty while all around them flows the frothy stream of the consumer culture.”

— Trevanian

17. “However, little by little, I am coming to the view that what I mistook for humility was, in fact, an accurate evaluation of your worth.”

— Trevanian

18. “It was not their irritating assumption of equality that annoyed Nicholai so much as their cultural confusions. The Americans seemed to confuse standard of living with quality of life, equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity, bravery with courage, machismo with manhood, liberty with freedom, wordiness with articulation, fun with pleasure – in short, all of the misconceptions common to those who assume that justice implies equality for all, rather than equality for equals.”

— Trevanian

19. “Ripe for romance? Is that not only the self-conscious and sensitive young man’s way of saying he was heavy with passion? Is not, perhaps, romance only the fiction by means of which the tender-minded negotiate their lust?”

— Trevanian

20. “The years passed unnoticed and unremembered, and one autumn morning I found myself suddenly forty-five years old. It was a time for weighing youthful hopes against mature accomplishment, for it was quite certain that I had by then done all I was ever going to do. Sitting alone at my desk that evening of my forty-fifth birthday I asked that least original of introspective questions: Where had it all gone? And the somewhat less banal question: What, after all, had it been? My.”

— Trevanian

21. “It is revealing of the American culture that its prototypic hero is the cowboy: an uneducated, boorish, Victorian migrant agricultural worker.”

— Trevanian

22. “Why did I submit myself to the butchery of the trenches when I might have served in the echelons as a medical officer? Even the most rudimentary knowledge of Doctor Freud would suggest that I was pursuing a death wish.”

— Trevanian

23. “She often said, and honestly believed, that she was not prejudiced – well, except in the case of Italian mobsters and drunken Irish loafers and stupid Poles and snooty Yankee Protestants, but then who wasn’t?”

— Trevanian

24. “Obtuseness was its own defense.”

— Trevanian

25. “When I hear middle-class people complain about the poor buying luxuries for their kids when they don’t even have enough for groceries, I remember the lavish Christmases my mother gave us, even at the risk of breaking up the family. Prudence is a bourgeois virtue, because the rich have something worth saving. The poor splurge because they need desperately to make a colorful splash across the drab fabric of their lives. The hungry don’t dream of brown rice and vegetables; they dream of cake.”

— Trevanian

26. “The shabby look was not his tailor’s fault; the Arab’s body was not designed for clothes requiring posture and discipline.”

— Trevanian

27. “But he could feel nothing but disdain for the artificial class of the merchant, who sucks up his living through buying and selling things he does not create, who collects power and wealth out of proportion to his discrimination, and who is responsible for all that is kitsch, for all that is change without progress, for all that is consumption without use.”

— Trevanian

28. “Indeed, my first interest in the pioneer work of Doctor Freud sprang, not from a concern for persons wounded in their collisions with reality, but from my personal curiosity about the nature of creativity and the springs of motivation. So.”

— Trevanian

29. “Diamond could not repress a sigh when he read that phrase. Miss Stern obviously suffered from the democratic delusion that all people are created interesting.”

— Trevanian

30. “But I was a polite kid, so I went. Even the wildest and toughest of us kids, several of whom ended up in prison and one on death row, would be accounted polite by today’s standards.”

— Trevanian

31. “Prudence is a bourgeois virtue, because the rich have something worth saving. The poor splurge because they need desperately to make a colorful splash across the drab fabric of their lives. The hungry don’t dream of brown rice and vegetables; they dream of cake.”

— Trevanian

32. “Mother used to shape and score the Spam, arrange the rings of pineapple, then pour a little maple syrup over it and bake it so that it came out looking almost exactly like a miniature glazed ham, and we used to have it with yams on which we melted margarine.”

— Trevanian

33. “Don’t overlook the truth; properly handled, it can be an effective weapon. But bear in mind that weapons get blunted with overuse.”

— Trevanian

34. “The poet in Le Cagot had confected for himself the role of the miles gloriosus, the Falstaffian clown – but with a unique difference: his braggadocio was founded on a record of reckless, laughing courage in numberless guerrilla actions against the fascist who oppressed his people in Spain.”

— Trevanian