Top 88 Quotes & Sayings by Raymond Carver

I think marriage is one of those things that writers draw on, one of those emotional reservoirs that go way back.

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.

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.

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.

I guess my writing has changed as my life has.

In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldn't turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.

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.

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.

When I'm writing, I write every day. It's lovely when that's happening. One day dovetailing into the next. Sometimes I don't even know what day of the week it is.

The fiction I'm most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.

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.

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.

What good are insights? They only make things worse.

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

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

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

I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I've crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I've come to a place I never thought I'd have to come to. And I don't know how I got here. It's a strange place. It's a place where a little harmless dreaming and then some sleepy, early-morning talk has led me into considerations of death and annihilation.

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.

I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I am a cigarette with a body attached to it

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.

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.

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.

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

If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, "created of warm blood and nerves" as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.

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.

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.

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

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

He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.