Quote

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
Start
Alcoholics
Never
Liar
Life
Thieves
Cheat
Liars
Intention
Bankrupt
Becoming
Alcoholic
Strange
Thief

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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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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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Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.
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Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
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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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When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.
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In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldnt turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.
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There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.
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I am too nervous to eat pie.
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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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My life is going to change. I feel it.
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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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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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You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
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I am a cigarette with a body attached to it
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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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Don’t complain, don’t explain.
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What good are insights? They only make things worse.
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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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