William Trevor Writing Quotations

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

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.

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

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

I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.