Quote

I am a cigarette with a body attached to it

Raymond Carver

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Raymond Carver
Age: 50 †
Born: 1938
Born: May 25
Died: 1988
Died: August 2
Author
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Clatskanie
Oregon
Attached
Cigarette
Body

More quotes by Raymond Carver

Image
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.
Raymond Carver
Image
You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
Raymond Carver
Image
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.
Raymond Carver
Image
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.
Raymond Carver
Image
A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.
Raymond Carver
Image
Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.
Raymond Carver
Image
Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
Raymond Carver
Image
When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.
Raymond Carver
Image
Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.
Raymond Carver
Image
I am too nervous to eat pie.
Raymond Carver
Image
You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.
Raymond Carver
Image
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.
Raymond Carver
Image
I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
Raymond Carver
Image
I dressed and went for a walk - determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer.
Raymond Carver
Image
Don’t complain, don’t explain.
Raymond Carver
Image
There's literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn't otherwise have.
Raymond Carver
Image
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.
Raymond Carver
Image
We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.
Raymond Carver
Image
Then I said something. I said, Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time. Just suppose. It doesn't hurt to suppose. Say none of the other had ever happened. You know what I mean? Then what? I said.
Raymond Carver
Image
I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.
Raymond Carver