Quote

Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.

Raymond Carver

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Raymond Carver
Age: 50 †
Born: 1938
Born: May 25
Died: 1988
Died: August 2
Author
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Clatskanie
Oregon
Anyone
Writing
Work
Poets
Express
Communicate
Writers
Poet
Simply

More quotes by Raymond Carver

Image
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
Image
I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
Raymond Carver
Image
My life is going to change. I feel it.
Raymond Carver
Image
There's literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn't otherwise have.
Raymond Carver
Image
In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldnt turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.
Raymond Carver
Image
I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.
Raymond Carver
Image
I am too nervous to eat pie.
Raymond Carver
Image
There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
Raymond Carver
Image
You have to have been in love to write poetry.
Raymond Carver
Image
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.
Raymond Carver
Image
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
Image
The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
Raymond Carver
Image
There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?
Raymond Carver
Image
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.
Raymond Carver
Image
This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.
Raymond Carver
Image
Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
Raymond Carver
Image
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
Image
Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
Raymond Carver
Image
When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.
Raymond Carver
Image
Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.
Raymond Carver