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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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What good are insights? They only make things worse.
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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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It's strange. You never start out life with the intention of becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat and a thief. Or a liar.
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There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
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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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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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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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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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I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
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Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.
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The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
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Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.
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