Raymond Carver Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Raymond Carver
Writers don't need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing – a sunset or an old shoe – in absolute and simple amazement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raymond Carver
Father, I love you,
yet how can I say thank you, I who can't hold my liquor either and don't even know the places to fish.

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

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

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

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

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

Raymond Carver
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.

Raymond Carver
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
Maxine said it was another tragedy in a long line of low-rent tragedies.

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

Raymond Carver