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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.

William Trevor

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William Trevor
Age: 88 †
Born: 1928
Born: May 24
Died: 2016
Died: November 21
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Sculptor
Short Story Writer
Translator
Writer
William Trevor Cox
William Cox Trevor
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Distress
Pleasure
Element
Pain
Author
Case
Elements
Based
Fiction
Cases
Autobiography

More quotes by William Trevor

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I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment.
William Trevor
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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.
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He traveled in order to come home.
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I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.
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The capacity you're thinking of is imagination without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.
William Trevor
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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
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People run away to be alone,' he said. Some people had to be alone.
William Trevor
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Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.
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People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.
William Trevor
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I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.
William Trevor
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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.
William Trevor
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Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn't do that. That is for me, and I shall do it.
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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