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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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Raymond Carver
Age: 50 †
Born: 1938
Born: May 25
Died: 1988
Died: August 2
Author
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Clatskanie
Oregon
Living
Wells
Well
Extent
Writing
Admire
Work
Writers
Like
Whose
Dead
Read

More quotes by Raymond Carver

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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.
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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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Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about 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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I dressed and went for a walk - determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer.
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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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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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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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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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I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.
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Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
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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.
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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.
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There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.
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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.
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 guess my writing has changed as my life has.
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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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.
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