Quote

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.

Raymond Carver

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Raymond Carver
Age: 50 †
Born: 1938
Born: May 25
Died: 1988
Died: August 2
Author
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Clatskanie
Oregon
Wrote
Despair
Hope
Littles
Little
Without
Every
Like

More quotes by Raymond Carver

Image
Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.
Raymond Carver
Image
I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.
Raymond Carver
Image
Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
Raymond Carver
Image
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.
Raymond Carver
Image
That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
Raymond Carver
Image
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.
Raymond Carver
Image
Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.
Raymond Carver
Image
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.
Raymond Carver
Image
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.
Raymond Carver
Image
There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?
Raymond Carver
Image
This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.
Raymond Carver
Image
I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.
Raymond Carver
Image
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.
Raymond Carver
Image
I am a cigarette with a body attached to it
Raymond Carver
Image
The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
Raymond Carver
Image
The smooth stones you pick up and examine under the moon's light have been made blue from the sea. Next morning when you pull them from your trouser pocket, they are still blue.
Raymond Carver
Image
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.
Raymond Carver
Image
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.
Raymond Carver
Image
When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.
Raymond Carver
Image
there isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails.
Raymond Carver