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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
Littles
Best
Little
Writing
Autobiography
Imagination

More quotes by 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.
Raymond Carver
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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.
Raymond Carver
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You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
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Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.
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I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.
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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.
Raymond Carver
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There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.
Raymond Carver
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You have to have been in love to write poetry.
Raymond Carver
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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.
Raymond Carver
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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.
Raymond Carver
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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.
Raymond Carver
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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.
Raymond Carver
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Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
Raymond Carver
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Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
Raymond Carver
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I dressed and went for a walk - determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer.
Raymond Carver
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The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
Raymond Carver
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I am a cigarette with a body attached to it
Raymond Carver
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Don’t complain, don’t explain.
Raymond Carver
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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.
Raymond Carver
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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.
Raymond Carver