William Trevor Quotes

I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.

Writing is a form of talking, although writing is such an odd thing in and of itself. People go about it in such different ways.

I am of the firm belief that everybody could write books and I never understand why they don't. After all, everybody speaks. Once the grammar has been learnt it is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.

The pen is the tongue of the soul; as are the thoughts engendered there, so will be the things written.

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.

The language of my books has shaped me as a man.

If you can talk, you can write.

I have expressed my opinion through the written word through my books, that is all.

I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English degree and/or creative writing degree you'll say: Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire; or maybe just: Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters. And then smile very serenely until they say, Oh.

A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes.

I wasn't quite used to writing a diary - I didn't understand why people did it - but I wrote down notes and they went into a poem.

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker. It has always been hard for me to say exactly what I mean in speech But if I have written a clumsiness, I may erase it.

Writing is the best way to talk without being interrupted.

It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is.

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I'm desperately trying to do is to get students to talk to themselves as though they are indeed themselves, and not someone else.

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

To a great extent, I still write for myself, write what amuses me. Fortunately, I have a quirky sort of strange sense of humor that appeals to other people and that's good. I still sort of write for myself though there are some areas of the book I feel I have to put in and I feel I have to deliver.

There are many people who get beat up, who suffer, who are victimized, and then they sit down to write and they write crap. How many of these graphic novels over the years are from really talented people? Most of them actually, if you look at them, are self-pitying confessionals about "poor me".

I'm not singing anymore; that is why I am so pleased to be writing. My daughter said, "You just found a different way of using your voice."

Early on, even in college, I figured out that it was just more interesting to me to create content than to write about other people. So that makes it more marketable.

I think a diversity of expression can only be good, so I think the more that people write about their experience, use their imagination to deal with their experience, you know, I think that's going to be good for not only for those authors but also for people who are interested in trying to understand it.

I have always wanted to write in such a way that will make people think, Why, I've always thought that but never found the words for it.

Writing is how I communicate my deepest beliefs, and what I hope are helpful observations about our dual citizenship, as children of God, as regular old mixed-up, worried, flawed, precious human beings.

letters are so much easier than living. One can give one's best.