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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
Poetry
Write
Writing
Love

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There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
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This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.
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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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There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.
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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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That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
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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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Don’t complain, don’t explain.
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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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What good are insights? They only make things worse.
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I am too nervous to eat pie.
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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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Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.
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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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I am a cigarette with a body attached to it
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Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.
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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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You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
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All of us, all of us, all of us trying to save our immortal souls, some ways seemingly more round about and mysterious than others. We are having a good time here. But hope all will be revealed soon.
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