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It's strange. You never start out life with the intention of becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat and a thief. Or a liar.
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
Strange
Thief
Start
Alcoholics
Never
Liar
Life
Thieves
Cheat
Liars
Intention
Bankrupt
Becoming
Alcoholic
More quotes by Raymond Carver
I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.
Raymond Carver
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.
Raymond Carver
Don’t complain, don’t explain.
Raymond Carver
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.
Raymond Carver
What good are insights? They only make things worse.
Raymond Carver
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.
Raymond Carver
That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
Raymond Carver
Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
Raymond Carver
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.
Raymond Carver
Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.
Raymond Carver
I dressed and went for a walk - determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer.
Raymond Carver
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.
Raymond Carver
In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldnt turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.
Raymond Carver
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.
Raymond Carver
I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.
Raymond Carver
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.
Raymond Carver
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.
Raymond Carver
Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.
Raymond Carver
There's literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn't otherwise have.
Raymond Carver
When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.
Raymond Carver