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

Raymond Carver

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Raymond Carver
Age: 50 †
Born: 1938
Born: May 25
Died: 1988
Died: August 2
Author
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Clatskanie
Oregon
Finally
Ones
Words
Better
Right
Writing

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there isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails.
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You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
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Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.
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Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.
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Don’t complain, don’t explain.
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You have to have been in love to write poetry.
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Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
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You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.
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My life is going to change. I feel it.
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I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.
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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.
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All of us, all of us, all of us trying to save our immortal souls, some ways seemingly more round about and mysterious than others. We are having a good time here. But hope all will be revealed soon.
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She won't give him back his look.
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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.
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Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.
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A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.
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The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
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But he stays by the window, remembering that life. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else—the cold and where he'd go in it—was outside, for a while anyway.
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Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.
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There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?
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