Quote

I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

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
Thinking
Story
Stories
Littles
Little
Writing
Thing
Circulation
Good
Menace
Think
Fine

More quotes by Raymond Carver

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Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.
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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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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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Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.
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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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You have to have been in love to write poetry.
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Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
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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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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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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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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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There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.
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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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She won't give him back his look.
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What good are insights? They only make things worse.
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There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
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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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Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
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Don’t complain, don’t explain.
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I am a cigarette with a body attached to it
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