William Trevor Quotes

I would advise you to write, my dear friend, because with your active nature, solitude is simply intolerable to you, and after some time your solitude would become perhaps attractive if you were to people it with creatures of your own fancy.

People don't become writers because they love having spontaneous, real-world interactions with living people as bodies with clothes in time.

As a writer, it is always fun to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes.

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

I don't think I wrote stories down when I was young, but I certainly made them up, perhaps sometimes losing track of the border between reality and make-believe.

There's many times this year I've sat back and thought, I'm making a living from making things up. It's the only skill I have so I've been really lucky.

Everyone has early fiction fantasies, but it wasn't until my second child Betsy was born that I allowed the urge to write a novel bubble up.

Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.

I wrote my first short story in third grade.

I was alone as a child. I lived in fairytales, adventures, Shakespeare. They are the friends, my books.

I started writing stories as a child.

I don't actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I'm most often inspired while reading - both fiction and nonfiction.

I don't have to go into outer space to write about an astronaut.

When I was about eight, I realised the person whose name was on the book got money for it, and it seemed almost too good to be true that you could get paid for making things up.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

I love books, and I love to read, and I had ideas for books that I thought would be neat to read.

At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

When I was young, I assumed that authors must have traveled the world or done exotic things in order to tell great stories.

I loved to read when I was a kid, and as soon as I realized that an actual person got to make up the books I loved so much, I decided that that was the job for me.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

I can create countries just as I can create the actions of my characters. That is why a lot of travel seems to me a waste of time.

I make things up for a living. It would be pretty boring to just fictionalize real people.

Most people who are trying to write kind of sit in their basements and pull it out of their imaginations.