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There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.

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
Conversation
Dying
Art

More quotes by Raymond Carver

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You have to have been in love to write poetry.
Raymond Carver
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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.
Raymond Carver
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I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
Raymond Carver
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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.
Raymond Carver
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There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
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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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.
Raymond Carver
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I dressed and went for a walk - determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer.
Raymond Carver
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Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.
Raymond Carver
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Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
Raymond Carver
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I am a cigarette with a body attached to it
Raymond Carver
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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.
Raymond Carver
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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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What good are insights? They only make things worse.
Raymond Carver
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You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.
Raymond Carver
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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.
Raymond Carver
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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.
Raymond Carver
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I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.
Raymond Carver
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Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.
Raymond Carver
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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.
Raymond Carver