William Trevor
William Trevor
William Trevor, KBE, is an Irish novelist, playwright and short story writer. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth24 May 1928
CountryIreland
believe writing knowing
I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment.
character knowing people
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.
began believe matter memories ralph summer time turned
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.
disease family
A disease in the family that is never mentioned.
delight irish reception telling whatever
The Irish delight in stories, of whatever kind, because their telling and their reception are by now instinctive.
mother thinking dozen
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.
life matter pieces
Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.
running people running-away
People run away to be alone,' he said. Some people had to be alone.
home order america
He traveled in order to come home.
pain elements fiction
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.
distance writing thinking
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.
artist tools outsiders
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.
thinking imagination understanding
The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.
writing people inarticulate
People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.