50 Quotes by William Trevor

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.

And when she was old, if she began to believe that Ralph had been a figment, and this summer too, it would not matter because time turned memories into figments anyway.

A disease in the family that is never mentioned.

The Irish delight in stories, of whatever kind, because their telling and their reception are by now instinctive.

Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.

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

He traveled in order to come home.

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.

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.