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You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?

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
Looks
Work
Intended
Mistakes
Mistake
Understand
Look

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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...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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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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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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You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.
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I dressed and went for a walk - determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer.
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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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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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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 is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?
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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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there isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails.
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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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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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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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She won't give him back his look.
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