Quote

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

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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
Didn
Firsts
Validation
First
Literary
Something
Accepted
Life
Otherwise
Gave
Creation
Business

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I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
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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 think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.
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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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I am a cigarette with a body attached to it
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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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Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
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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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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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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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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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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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Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
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There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
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The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
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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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My life is going to change. I feel 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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