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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
Great
Writing
Even
Every
Good
Specifications
World
According
Writer
Makes

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What good are insights? They only make things worse.
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A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.
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There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
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You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.
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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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Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.
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Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.
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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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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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I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
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Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
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You have to have been in love to write poetry.
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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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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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I am a cigarette with a body attached to it
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We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.
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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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This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.
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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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