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

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
World
According
Writer
Makes
Great
Writing
Even
Every
Good
Specifications

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Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.
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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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That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
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I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
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You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
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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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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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Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.
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The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
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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.
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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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What good are insights? They only make things worse.
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I am too nervous to eat pie.
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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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You have to have been in love to write poetry.
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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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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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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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I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.
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I am a cigarette with a body attached to it
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