Raymond Carver quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Raymond Carver on Wise Famous Quotes.

Writers will be judged by what they write.

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

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

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.

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

I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.

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

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

Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.

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

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

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

He seemed full of some goodness she didn't understand

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

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

I am too nervous to eat pie.

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

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.

There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.

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

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

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

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

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

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

My life is going to change. I feel it.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I lifted him out. I held him. I held that half of him.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

You have to have been in love to write poetry.

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.

You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.

What do any of us really know about love?

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

What good are insights? They only make things worse.

Don't complain, don't explain.

My lungs are thick with the smoke of your absence.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

life was a stone cutting and grinding...

I guess my writing has changed as my life has.

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

He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.

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.

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

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

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

She won't give him back his look.

I am a cigarette with a body attached to it

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

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

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

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

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.