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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

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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
Trying
World
Extent
Beginning
Outside
Turn
Turns
Write

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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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I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
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I am a cigarette with a body attached to it
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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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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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Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.
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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 is no God, and conversation is a dying art.
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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.
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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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Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
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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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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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I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.
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You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
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Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
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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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You have to have been in love to write poetry.
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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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You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.
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