William Trevor

I had graduated from thrillers and detective stories, and begun to read A. J. Cronin and Francis Brett Young, Cecil Roberts—middlebrow authors like that. I thought them marvelous, but later I moved on from them to Somerset Maugham, whom I’ve always admired—in particular his short stories—and then I began to read the Irish writers whom I’d never read, because we didn’t in Ireland for some reason. We ignored them, perhaps because they were homegrown produce. I probably began with Joyce; and at some point I read Dickens and the Victorians. I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.

- William Trevor, Paris Review