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A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

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
Writing
Autobiography
Imagination
Littles
Best
Little

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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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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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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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Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.
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Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.
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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 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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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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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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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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I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
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You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.
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Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
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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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Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.
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I am too nervous to eat pie.
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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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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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You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
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