Quote

there isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails.

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
Enough
Prevails
Long
Intervals
Sweetness
Appears
Chance
Given
Anything
Live

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I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
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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 was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
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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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The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
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A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.
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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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Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.
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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'm always learning something. Learning never ends.
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You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.
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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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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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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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Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.
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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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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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You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
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Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read. Fought against it for a minute. Then looked out the window at the rain. And gave over. Put myself entirely in the keep of this rainy morning. Would I live my life over again? Make the same unforgivable mistakes? Yes, given half a chance. Yes.
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