Quote

Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.

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
Tension
Aware
Effects
Conditions
Internals
Fiction
Internal
Movement
External
Shows
Crafts

More quotes by Raymond Carver

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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.
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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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I am a cigarette with a body attached to it
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Don’t complain, don’t explain.
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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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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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There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
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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.
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She won't give him back his look.
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There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.
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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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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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I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
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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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My life is going to change. I feel it.
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You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
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You have to have been in love to write poetry.
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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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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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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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