Raymond Carver Quotes

there isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails.

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.

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

Write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?

And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

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.

It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.

The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.

Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.

But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window--maybe rearrange all the furniture.

He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.

Art doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it.

There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about.

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.

You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?

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.

Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it.

Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.

I am a cigarette with a body attached to it

Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.

Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.

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.

What good are insights? They only make things worse.

Nights without beginning that had no end. Talking about a past as if it'd really happened. Telling themselves that this time next year, this time next year, things were going to be different.

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

This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.

Something’s died in me,” she goes. “It took a long time for it to do it, but it’s dead. You’ve killed something, just like you’d took an axe to it. Everything is dirt now.

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.

Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.

I dressed and went for a walk - determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer.

In short, everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well.

I'm moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.

I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.

There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.

That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?

and did you get what you wanted from this life even so? i did.

My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.

There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.

A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore.

Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.

I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.

My life is going to change. I feel it.

A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

Don’t complain, don’t explain.

I've done as many as 20 or 30 drafts of a story. Never less than 10 or 12 drafts.

Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.

Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.

We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.