Raymond Carver Quotes

I am too nervous to eat pie.

When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.

You have to have been in love to write poetry.

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.

The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.

You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.

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.

What do any of us really know about love?

I guess my writing has changed as my life has.

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.

Writers will be judged by what they write.

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.

She won't give him back his look.

There's literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn't otherwise have.

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.

In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldnt turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.

there isn't enough of anythingas long as we live. But at intervalsa sweetness appears and, given a chanceprevails.

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

You see, this happened a few months ago, but it's still going on right now, and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.

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.

I don't fire up the prose. I just tell it straight and don't fool around with it.

They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

But dying is for the sweetest ones. And he remembers sweetness, when life was sweet, and sweetly he was given that other lifetime.

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

I lifted him out. I held him. I held that half of him.