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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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Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.
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There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I'd like to know. I wish someone could tell me.
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A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.
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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.
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Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
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I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.
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There's literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn't otherwise have.
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Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
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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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When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.
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The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
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I dressed and went for a walk - determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer.
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I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.
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Don’t complain, don’t explain.
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The smooth stones you pick up and examine under the moon's light have been made blue from the sea. Next morning when you pull them from your trouser pocket, they are still blue.
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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 have to have been in love to write poetry.
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You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
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Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.
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I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
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