William Trevor

"... I liked teaching math best because I don’t have a natural way with figures and therefore had sympathy with the children who didn’t either. And I greatly respected the ones who did possess that aptitude. My skill in art and English made me impatient, and I found those subjects rather dreary to teach as a result. “Why are the art room walls covered with pictures of such ugly women?” a headmaster asked me once. “And why have some of them got those horrible cigarette butts hanging out of their nostrils?” I explained that I had asked the children to paint the ugliest woman they could think of. Unfortunately, almost all of them had looked no further than the headmaster’s wife. I like that devilish thing in children."

"You have to walk to get to know a city; it was then — in the Dublin of the 1940s — that I first discovered that. was a staid row of unlicensed hotels, politely elbowing one another for attention; was famous for its sausage shop. The set the tone for , and Charlemont Street offered a display of s, extracted from the footsore: The Walker's Friend, a notice said. and Lad Lane and Lady Lane, Ebenezer Terrace and Morning Star Road: all of them had an echo of a lost significance."

"... The way I think I write is by creating the actual raw material of fiction first of all, rather rapidly, very quickly, and then this has to be turned into a story or novel. I get quite a lot of manuscripts that people send me, young people asking me what I think of them. And almost all of them are still raw material which hasn’t been pushed or stretched or chopped up in order to give it form. What they’ve done is just to start the job but they haven’t completed it. You have to start with a mess, which is rather like the mess we all live in in the world, you know. You start with that mess and you really have got to create for yourself in your fiction. And then, the next thing you do is to make that palatable for the reader. The reader is terribly, terribly important because without the reader, as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing. It’s a kind of relationship, sometimes almost a friendship."

"Trevor won many honors, including the of the for “Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories”; the Prize for literature and the for fiction in 1976; and the three times: in 1978 for “,” in 1983 for “Fools of Fortune” and in 1994 for “.” The latter was made into a 1999 film starring ."

"Trevor is not a benign . There has always been a frightening, uncomfortable, cruel side to his work, particularly in his sensationalist appetite (which he shares with one of his great predecessors, Elizabeth Bowen, who gets a mention here) for seedy criminals, s, and s. In this volume, some tame s have their necks wrung, a girl pushes her mother's lover down two flights of stairs, a maniac pursues his estranged wife with a fantasy of revenge, and a con man replies to a series of s to get himself a driver and a free meal."

"... He drew us into the lives of English and Irish s and s, priests and parishioners, and even those who, by dint of circumstance or carefully curated effort, ascended a rung or two on the hierarchy. And although his work very much reflected the prevailing political and religious mores of its settings, it did not focus on the large sweep of history. Instead, Trevor settled his gaze on private yearnings and small, wayward impulses: stories about siblings scuffling over small-bore inheritances, about lost love, about minor duplicities, and, always, about the press and passage of time."