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Don’t complain, don’t explain.

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
Complain
Complaining
Explain

More quotes by Raymond Carver

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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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Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.
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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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Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.
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You have to have been in love to write poetry.
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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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Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.
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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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Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
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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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A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.
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I am a cigarette with a body attached to it
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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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All of us, all of us, all of us trying to save our immortal souls, some ways seemingly more round about and mysterious than others. We are having a good time here. But hope all will be revealed soon.
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I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.
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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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You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
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Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.
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She won't give him back his look.
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Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
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