Raymond Carver
I think marriage is one of those things that writers draw on, one of those emotional reservoirs that go way back.Collection: Marriage
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.Collection: Time
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.Collection: Dad
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.Collection: Imagination
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 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.
In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldn't turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.
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.
I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
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.
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.Collection: Writing
That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.Collection: Writing
there isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails.Collection: Long
And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.Collection: I Love You
Write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Writing
Art doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it.Collection: Art
Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.Collection: Dream
Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.Collection: Goes On
It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.Collection: Talking
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.Collection: Liars
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.Collection: Love
There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about.Collection: Writing
The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.Collection: Water
You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?Collection: Mistake
I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.Collection: Ends
He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.Collection: Ifs
Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.Collection: Writing
A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Long
Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Dream
Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.Collection: Morning
I am too nervous to eat pie.Collection: Pie
She won't give him back his look.Collection: Giving
There's literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn't otherwise have.Collection: Validation
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.Collection: Heart
Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Worry
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.Collection: Philosophy
Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it.Collection: Jobs
I am a cigarette with a body attached to itCollection: Body
There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?Collection: Life
I dressed and went for a walk - determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer.Collection: Journey
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.Collection: Writing
What good are insights? They only make things worse.Collection: Insight