William Trevor

“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

“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

“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, Paris Review interview

“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

“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