Top 100 Quotes About Raymond Carver
#1. Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.
Leslie Fiedler
#2. My dad read, I think, the Perry Mason mysteries and Zane Grey and some humor compendiums ... And then at one point, the bookmobile started coming to town. That was really cool. I mean, that was when I read my first Raymond Carver story. I think that was probably 1969 or so. I must have been 13.
Tom Drury
#3. Beauties" by Anton Chekhov, "The Doll's House" by Katherine Mansfield, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by J. D. Salinger, "Brownies" or "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" both by ZZ Packer, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" by Amy Hempel, "Fat" by Raymond Carver, "Indian Camp
Gabrielle Zevin
#4. From a literary standpoint, I've been loving Raymond Carver's short stories, William Carlos Williams' poems, Richard Siken's 'Crush', John Fante, and Jim Harrison's book of ghazals. I love film and photography too, so many of my songs are very image rich from those influences.
Greta Salpeter
#5. John Dos Passos, Raymond Carver, Flaubert and William Maxwell were all very influential when I first started writing. Now, the writers I'm most interested in are the writers who are most unlike me: for example, Denis Johnson.
Jonathan Dee
#6. All over the world great writers were dying young: Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, and now here was Angela wrestling with the Reaper. A fatwa was not the only way to die. There were older types of death sentence that still worked very well.
Salman Rushdie
#7. I love fiction. I like reading short stories. Cupcakes, pop songs, Polaroids, and short stories. They all raise and answer questions in a short space. I like Lorrie Moore. Amy Hempel. Tim O'Brien. Raymond Carver. All the heartbreakers.
Laurel Nakadate
#8. I am really into how words sound out loud, so I was always the kid who would, like, read the page of the book to herself in her room over and over and over. And Raymond Carver is great for that. Tobias Wolff is an author who is really good for that as well.
Lorde
#9. It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud.
Ira Glass
#10. I read a lot of short fiction, like Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Carver and Wells Tower.
Lorde
#11. Hummingbird Suppose I say summer, write the word "hummingbird," put it in an envelope, take it down the hill to the box. When you open my letter you will recall those days and how much, just how much, I love you. - RAYMOND CARVER
Catherine McKenzie
#12. 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.
Raymond Carver
#14. 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
#15. The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.
Raymond Carver
#16. I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.
Raymond Carver
#17. He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.
Raymond Carver
#18. We opened our eyes and turned in bed to take a good look at each other. We both knew it then. We'd reached the end of something, and the thing was to find out where new to start.
Raymond Carver
#19. I'm moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.
Raymond Carver
#20. We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.
Raymond Carver
#21. It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even startling power.
Raymond Carver
#22. All this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I'm wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don't know anything, and I'm the first one to admit it.
Raymond Carver
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Drinking's funny. When I look back on it, all of our important decisions have been figured out when we were drinking. Even when we talked about having to cut back on drinking, we'd be sitting at the kitchen table or out at the picnic table with a six-pack or whiskey.
Raymond Carver
#26. I've done as many as 20 or 30 drafts of a story. Never less than 10 or 12 drafts.
Raymond Carver
#27. But here is the thing. When he gets on me, I suddenly feel I am fat. I feel am terrifically fat, so fat that Rudy is a tiny thing and hardly there at all.
Raymond Carver
#28. Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it.
Raymond Carver
#29. When you're writing fiction or poetry ... it really comes down to this: indifference to everything except what you're doing ... A young writer could do worse than follow the advice given in those lines.
Raymond Carver
#31. Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.
Raymond Carver
#32. What's there to tell? The people over there embrace for a minute, and then they go inside the house together. They leave the light burning. Then they remember, and it goes out.
Raymond Carver
#33. When you live in the dark for so long, you begin to love it. And it loves you back, and isn't that the point? You think, the face turns to the shadows, and just as well. It accepts, it heals, it allows. But it also devours.
Raymond Carver
#34. Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I've forgotten, I don't know for sure.
Raymond Carver
#35. Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.
Raymond Carver
#36. There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?
Raymond Carver
#37. It is August.
My life is going to change. I feel it.
Raymond Carver
#38. I thought for a minute of the world outside my house, and then I didn't have any more thoughts except the thought that I had to hurry up and sleep.
Raymond Carver
#39. All of us, all of us, all of us trying to save our immortal souls, some ways seemingly more round about and mysterious than others. We are having a good time here. But hope all will be revealed soon.
Raymond Carver
#40. You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.
Raymond Carver
#41. It's something that I feel I know about, relationships between men and women. I like to write from the woman's point of view now and again, to get inside her head, to feel what she's feeling.
Raymond Carver
#42. Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
Raymond Carver
#43. What good are insights? They only make things worse.
Raymond Carver
#44. Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He'd said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life.
Raymond Carver
#45. He seemed full of some goodness she didn't understand
Raymond Carver
#46. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
Raymond Carver
#48. I'm a heart surgeon, sure, but I'm just a mechanic. I go in and I fuck around and I fix things. Shit.
Raymond Carver
#49. 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.
Raymond Carver
#50. Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
Raymond Carver
#51. The men who began their life's work on [the cathedrals], they never lived to see the completion of their work.
Raymond Carver
#52. Late Fragment
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Raymond Carver
#54. 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.
Raymond Carver
#55. 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.
Raymond Carver
#56. I dressed and went for a walk - determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer.
Raymond Carver
#58. Years later,
I still wanted to give up
friends, love, starry skies,
for a house where no one
was home, no one coming back,
and all I could drink
Raymond Carver
#59. 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.
Raymond Carver
#60. 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
#61. Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.
Raymond Carver
#62. 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.
Raymond Carver
#63. I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.
Raymond Carver
#64. Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.
Raymond Carver
#65. When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.
Raymond Carver
#67. I lifted him out. I held him. I held that half of him.
Raymond Carver
#68. I don't fire up the prose. I just tell it straight and don't fool around with it.
Raymond Carver
#69. 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.
Raymond Carver
#70. There is in the soul a desire for not thinking.
For being still. Coupled with this
a desire to be strict, yes, and rigorous.
But the soul is also a smooth son of a bitch,
not always trustworthy. And I forgot that.
Raymond Carver
#71. There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about.
Raymond Carver
#72. Then i don't know I remembered how he was when he was nineteen, the way he looked, running across this field to where his dad sat on a tractor, hand over his eyes, watching Wes run toward him - Chef's House
Raymond Carver
#73. In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldn't turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.
Raymond Carver
#74. I think marriage is one of those things that writers draw on, one of those emotional reservoirs that go way back.
Raymond Carver
#75. Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.
Raymond Carver
#76. That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.
Raymond Carver
#77. You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
Raymond Carver
#78. He did not know what to do. Not just now, he thought, not just in this, not just about this, today and tomorrow, but every day on the earth.
Raymond Carver
#79. 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
#80. Do me a favor this morning. Draw the curtain and come back to bed.
Forget the coffee. We'll pretend
we're in a foreign country, and in love.
Raymond Carver
#81. There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
Raymond Carver
#82. It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.
Raymond Carver
#84. 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
#85. For a long time I wanted to do the kind of work my dad did. He was going to ask his foreman at the mill to put me on after I graduated. So I worked at the mill for about six months. But I hated the work and knew from the first day I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life.
Raymond Carver
#86. How far would you run with a piece of lead in your heart?
Raymond Carver
#87. Why don't you kids dance? he decided to say, and then said it. "Why don't you dance?
Raymond Carver
#88. When I'm fishing, I feel guilty that I'm not writing, and when I'm writing, I feel guilty that I'm not fishing. But when push comes to shove, I'll always take the writing.
Raymond Carver
#89. A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore.
Raymond Carver
#90. Most of my stories, if not all of them, have some basis in real life. That's the kind of fiction I'm most interested in. I suppose that's one reason I don't have much respect for fiction that seems to be game playing.
Raymond Carver
#91. My lungs are thick with the smoke of your absence.
Raymond Carver
#92. I'd like to go out in the front yard and shout something. "None of this is worth it!" That's what I'd like people to hear.
Raymond Carver
#94. 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.
Raymond Carver
#98. And did you get what you wanted from this life even so? i did.
Raymond Carver
#99. The past is unclear. It's as if there is a film over those early years. I can't even be sure that the things I remember happening really happened to me.
Raymond Carver
#100. They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.
Raymond Carver
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