Raymond Carver Quotes: top 79 famous quotes about Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Raymond Carver quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

Writers will be judged by what they write. — Raymond Carver

Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate. — Raymond Carver

A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore. — Raymond Carver

You're ... writing for other writers to an extent-the dead writers whose work you admire, as well as the living writers you like to read. — Raymond Carver

Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications. — Raymond Carver

I'm always learning something. Learning never ends. — Raymond Carver

You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand? — Raymond Carver

There isn't enough of anything
as long as we live. But at intervals
a sweetness appears and, given a chance
prevails. — Raymond Carver

Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from. — Raymond Carver

Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick. — Raymond Carver

Art doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it. — Raymond Carver

This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world. — Raymond Carver

He seemed full of some goodness she didn't understand — Raymond Carver

That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window. — Raymond Carver

Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it. — Raymond Carver

I am too nervous to eat pie. — Raymond Carver

I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation. — Raymond Carver

A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house. Except for the chrome hooks, he was an ordinary-looking man of fifty or so. — Raymond Carver

There is no God, and conversation is a dying art. — Raymond Carver

The fiction I'm most interested in has lines of reference to the real world. — Raymond Carver

But dying is for the sweetest ones. And he remembers sweetness, when life was sweet, and sweetly he was given that other lifetime. — Raymond Carver

In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldn't turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now. — Raymond Carver

In short, everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well. — Raymond Carver

It is August.
My life is going to change. I feel it. — Raymond Carver

My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form. — Raymond Carver

My life is going to change. I feel it. — Raymond Carver

There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about. — Raymond Carver

When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself. — Raymond Carver

I am a cigarette with a body attached to it — Raymond Carver

I want to hide from it, that's what I want to do. I want to just close my eyes and let it pass by. Let it take the next man. — Raymond Carver

Why don't you kids dance? he decided to say, and then said it. "Why don't you dance? — Raymond Carver

I don't fire up the prose. I just tell it straight and don't fool around with it. — Raymond Carver

He did not know what to do. Not just now, he thought, not just in this, not just about this, today and tomorrow, but every day on the earth. — Raymond Carver

They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving. — Raymond Carver

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that. — Raymond Carver

There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had. — Raymond Carver

Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them. — Raymond Carver

I'd like to go out in the front yard and shout something. "None of this is worth it!" That's what I'd like people to hear. — Raymond Carver

I'm moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself. — Raymond Carver

Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement. — Raymond Carver

I thought for a minute of the world outside my house, and then I didn't have any more thoughts except the thought that I had to hurry up and sleep. — Raymond Carver

I crack the other egg.
Surely we have diminished one another. — Raymond Carver

The men who began their life's work on [the cathedrals], they never lived to see the completion of their work. — Raymond Carver

Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it. — Raymond Carver

The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places. — Raymond Carver

I lifted him out. I held him. I held that half of him. — Raymond Carver

Don't complain, don't explain. — Raymond Carver

Write what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets? — Raymond Carver

I think marriage is one of those things that writers draw on, one of those emotional reservoirs that go way back. — Raymond Carver

I've done as many as 20 or 30 drafts of a story. Never less than 10 or 12 drafts. — Raymond Carver

There's literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn't otherwise have. — Raymond Carver

We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up. — Raymond Carver

Do me a favor this morning. Draw the curtain and come back to bed.
Forget the coffee. We'll pretend
we're in a foreign country, and in love. — Raymond Carver

Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on. — Raymond Carver

My lungs are thick with the smoke of your absence. — Raymond Carver

I dressed and went for a walk - determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer. — Raymond Carver

What good are insights? They only make things worse. — Raymond Carver

How far would you run with a piece of lead in your heart? — Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate. — Leslie Fiedler

What do any of us really know about love? — Raymond Carver

It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud. — Ira Glass

You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk. — Raymond Carver

It's strange. You never start out life with the intention of becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat and a thief. Or a liar. — Raymond Carver

And did you get what you wanted from this life even so? i did. — Raymond Carver

You have to have been in love to write poetry. — Raymond Carver

life was a stone cutting and grinding... — Raymond Carver

I guess my writing has changed as my life has. — Raymond Carver

After a minute, you continue writing.
she screams again.
you wonder how long this can go on. — Raymond Carver

He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her. — Raymond Carver

I read a lot of short fiction, like Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Carver and Wells Tower. — Lorde

My heart is broken," she goes. "It's turned to a piece of stone. I'm no good. That's what's as bad as anything, that I'm no good anymore. — Raymond Carver

Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I've forgotten, I don't know for sure. — Raymond Carver

Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this. — Raymond Carver

There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do? — Raymond Carver

She won't give him back his look. — Raymond Carver

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones. — Raymond Carver

The light was draining out of the room, going back through the window where it had come from. — Raymond Carver

It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love. — Raymond Carver

I'm a heart surgeon, sure, but I'm just a mechanic. I go in and I fuck around and I fix things. Shit. — Raymond Carver