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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
Firsts
Validation
First
Literary
Something
Accepted
Life
Otherwise
Gave
Creation
Business
Didn
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There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I'd like to know. I wish someone could tell me.
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That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
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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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A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.
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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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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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Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
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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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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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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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You have to have been in love to write poetry.
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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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