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

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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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My life is going to change. I feel it.
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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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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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What good are insights? They only make things worse.
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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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Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.
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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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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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A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.
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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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That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
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The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
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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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I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.
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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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Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.
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You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
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There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
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