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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
Complaining
Explain
Complain

More quotes by Raymond Carver

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I am too nervous to eat pie.
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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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I am a cigarette with a body attached to it
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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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Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.
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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.
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Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
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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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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 is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?
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I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
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You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.
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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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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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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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Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
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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.
Raymond Carver
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The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
Raymond Carver
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I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.
Raymond Carver