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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.

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
Getting
Lives
Fouled
Numbered
Shake
Shakes
Ready
Knew
Days

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Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
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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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There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.
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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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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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That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
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You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
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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.
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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 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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You have to have been in love to write poetry.
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Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.
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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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