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You have to have been in love to write poetry.

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
Love
Poetry
Write
Writing

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I am too nervous to eat pie.
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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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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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You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
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Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.
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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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There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?
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I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
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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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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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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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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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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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What good are insights? They only make things worse.
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My life is going to change. I feel it.
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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 am a cigarette with a body attached to it
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You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.
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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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