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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
Writing
Love
Poetry
Write

More quotes by Raymond Carver

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A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.
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We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.
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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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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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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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Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.
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There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
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My life is going to change. I feel it.
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Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
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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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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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Don’t complain, don’t explain.
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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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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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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.
Raymond Carver
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That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
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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.
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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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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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