Top 25 William Trevor Quotes (2024 Update)

William Trevor Quote: “Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person’s life.”

1. “Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person’s life.”

— William Trevor

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

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

— William Trevor

William Trevor Quote: “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.”

3. “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

William Trevor Quote: “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.”

4. “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

William Trevor Quote: “He traveled in order to come home.”

5. “He traveled in order to come home.”

— William Trevor

William Trevor Quote: “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.”

6. “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

William Trevor Quote: “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.”

7. “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

William Trevor Quote: “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.”

8. “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

William Trevor Quote: “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.”

9. “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.”

— William Trevor

William Trevor Quote: “I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment.”

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

— William Trevor

William Trevor Quote: “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.”

11. “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

William Trevor Quote: “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.”

12. “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

William Trevor Quote: “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.”

13. “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

William Trevor Quote: “I cried myself, thinking of the grass growing on her tennis court, and the cruelty that was natural.”

14. “I cried myself, thinking of the grass growing on her tennis court, and the cruelty that was natural.”

— William Trevor

William Trevor Quote: “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.”

15. “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.”

— William Trevor

William Trevor Quote: “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.”

16. “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

William Trevor Quote: “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.”

17. “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

William Trevor Quote: “He was new to London in those days, and he had not liked it. He had not cared for the intensity of the traffic, or the underground trains that were full of a human smell and of people who lit up tipped cigarettes and pushed with their elbows.”

18. “He was new to London in those days, and he had not liked it. He had not cared for the intensity of the traffic, or the underground trains that were full of a human smell and of people who lit up tipped cigarettes and pushed with their elbows.”

— William Trevor

William Trevor Quote: “She is embarrassed to be alive and no one on earth can fully console her.”

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

— William Trevor

William Trevor Quote: “Would he ever, he wondered, escape from people who banged on the doors he locked to demand his egress?”

20. “Would he ever, he wondered, escape from people who banged on the doors he locked to demand his egress?”

— William Trevor

William Trevor Quote: “The capacity you’re thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.”

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

— William Trevor

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

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

— William Trevor

William Trevor Quote: “Calamity shaped a life when, long ago, chance was so cruel.”

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

— William Trevor

William Trevor Quote: “He’ll not confess he knew, in the end, that the drama of death does not come into it – that some pain’s too dull to be worthy of a romantic shroud. Courage could have brushed glamour over what little there was, but courage is ridiculous when the other person doesn’t want to know.”

24. “He’ll not confess he knew, in the end, that the drama of death does not come into it – that some pain’s too dull to be worthy of a romantic shroud. Courage could have brushed glamour over what little there was, but courage is ridiculous when the other person doesn’t want to know.”

— William Trevor

William Trevor Quote: “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.”

25. “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

William Trevor Quote: “Has some fowl played a part in your ancestry?”

26. “Has some fowl played a part in your ancestry?”

— William Trevor

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