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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
Writing
Even
Every
Good
Specifications
World
According
Writer
Makes
Great

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Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.
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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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You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.
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The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
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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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Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
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What good are insights? They only make things worse.
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Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.
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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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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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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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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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In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldnt turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.
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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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There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.
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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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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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Life and death matters, yes. And the question of how to behave in this world, how to go in the face of everything. Time is short and the water is rising.
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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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