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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
Imagination
Littles
Best
Little
Writing
Autobiography

More quotes by Raymond Carver

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I am too nervous to eat pie.
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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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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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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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What good are insights? They only make things worse.
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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.
Raymond Carver
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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 have to have been in love to write poetry.
Raymond Carver
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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.
Raymond Carver
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The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
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That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
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I am a cigarette with a body attached to it
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I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.
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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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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.
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Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
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Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
Raymond Carver
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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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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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Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.
Raymond Carver