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Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.

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
Haydn
Symphonies
Symphony
Remember
Great

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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
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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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Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
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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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There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
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I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.
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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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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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That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
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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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Don’t complain, don’t explain.
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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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