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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

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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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Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.
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What good are insights? They only make things worse.
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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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Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.
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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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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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I am a cigarette with a body attached to it
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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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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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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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I am too nervous to eat pie.
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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.
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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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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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She won't give him back his look.
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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'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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