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

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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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Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
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The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
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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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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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She won't give him back his look.
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That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
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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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Don’t complain, don’t explain.
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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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I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
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Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.
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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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In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldnt turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.
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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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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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My life is going to change. I feel it.
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