Raymond Carver Quotes

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.

He understood that it only took one lunatic and a torch to bring everything to ruin.

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.

I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.

I don't know why, but I suddenly felt a long way away from everybody I had known and loved when I was a girl. I missed people. For a minute I stood there and wished I could get back to that time. Then with my next thought I understood clearly that I couldn't do that. No. But it came to me then that my life did not remotely resemble the life I thought I'd have when I had been young and looking ahead to things.

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.

I want to hide from it, that's what I want to do. I want to just close my eyes and let it pass by. Let it take the next man.

This Word Love"

I will not go when she calls
even if she says I love you,
especially that,
even though she swears
and promises nothing
but love love.

The light in this room
covers every
thing equally;
even my arm throws no shadow,
it too is consumed with light.

But this word love -
this word grows dark, grows
heavy and shakes itself, begins
to eat, to shudder and convulse
its way through this paper
until we too have dimmed in
its transparent throat and still
are riven, are glistening, hip and thigh, your
loosened hair which knows
no hesitation.

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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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Two days ago, in the afternoon, Amanda said to me, "I can't read books any more. Who has the time?" It was the day after Oliver had left, and we were in this little café in the industrial part of the city. "Who can concentrate any more?" she said, stirring her coffee. "Who reads? Do you read?" (I shook my head.) "Somebody must read, I guess. You see all these books around in store windows, and there are those clubs. Somebody's reading," she said. "Who? I don't know anybody who reads.

I wish I could be like everybody else in this neighborhood--your basic, normal, unaccomplished person-and go up to my bedroom, and lie down, and sleep. It's going to be a big day today, and I'd like to be ready for it. I wish I could sleep and wake up and find everything in my life different. Not necessarily just the big things,.... but things clearly within my power.

And certain things around us will change, become easier or harder, one thing or the other, but nothing will ever really be any different. I believe that. We have made our decisions, our lives have been set in motion, and they will go on and on until they stop. But if that is true, then what? I mean, what if you believe that, but you keep it covered up, until one day something happens that should change something, but then you see nothing is going to change after all. What then? Meanwhile, the people around you continue to talk and act as if you were the same person as yesterday, or last night, or five minutes before, but you are really undergoing a crisis, your heart feels damaged ...

That's right,' Mel said. 'Some vassal would come along and spear the bastard in the name of love. Or whatever the fuck it was they fought over in those days.'
Same things we fight over these days,' Terri said.
Laura said, 'Nothing's changed.

After a minute, you continue writing.
she screams again.
you wonder how long this can go on.

The men who began their life's work on [the cathedrals], they never lived to see the completion of their work.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Grief"

Woke up early this morning and from my bed
looked far across the Strait to see
a small boat moving through the choppy water,
a single running light on. Remembered
my friend who used to shout
his dead wife's name from hilltops
around Perugia. Who set a plate
for her at his simple table long after
she was gone. And opened the windows
so she could have fresh air. Such display
I found embarrassing. So did his other
friends. I couldn't see it.
Not until this morning.

Woke up early" title="Raymond Carver Quotes: Grief"

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In addition to being in love, we like each other and enjoy one another's company.

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

I am a cigarette with a body attached to it

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

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.

The light was draining out of the room, going back through the window where it had come from.

Why don't you kids dance? he decided to say, and then said it. "Why don't you dance?

But I guess even the knights were vessels to someone. Isn't that the way it worked? But then everyone is always a vessel to someone. Isn't that right, Terri? But what I liked about the knights, besides their ladies, was that they had that suit of armor, you know, and they couldn't get hurt very easily. No cars in those days, you know? No drunk teenagers to tear into your ass."
Vassals," Terri said.
What?" Mel said.
Vassals," Terri said. "They were called vassals.

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

I don't want to talk to anybody. Actually, I'd talk to Molly, if I could, but I can't any longer - she's somebody else now. She isn't Molly any more. But - what can I say? - I'm somebody else, too.

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

My life is going to change. I feel it.

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

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

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.

Don't complain, don't explain.

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.

He was going somewhere, he knew that. And if it was the wrong direction, sooner or later he'd find it out.

It's possible, in a poem or a 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. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine
the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me.

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

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

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.

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.

I'm a heart surgeon, sure, but I'm just a mechanic. I go in and I fuck around and I fix things. Shit.

It is August.
My life is going to change. I feel it.

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.

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

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

Well, the husband was very depressed for the longest while. Even after he found out that his wife was going to pull through, he was still very depressed. Not about the accident, though. I mean, the accident was one thing, but it wasn't everything. I'd get up to his mouth-hole, you know, and he'd say no, it wasn't the accident exactly but it was because he couldn't see her through his eye-holes. He said that was what was making him feel bad. Can you imagine? I'm telling you, the man's heart was breaking because he couldn't turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

What's that sound?" Fran said.
Then something as big as a vulture flapped heavily down from one of the trees and landed just in front of the car.It shook itself.It turned its long neck toward the car, raised its head, and regarded us.

"Goddamn it," I said.I sat there with my hands on the wheel and stared at the thing.
"Can you believe it?" Fran said."I never saw a real one before."

We both knew it was a peacock, sure,but we didn't say the word out loud.We just watched it.The bird turned its head up in the air and made this harsh cry again.It had fluffed itself out and looked about twice the size it'd been when it landed.

"Goddamn," I said again. We stayed where we were in the front seat.
The bird moved forward a little.Then it turned its head to the side and braced itself.It kept its bright, wild eye right on us.Its tail was raised, and it was like a big fan folding in and out.
There was every color in the rainbow shining from that tail.

"My God," Fran said quietly.She moved her hand over to my knee.
"Goddamn," I said. There was nothing else to say.

The bird made this strange wailing sound once more. "May- awe, may-awe!" it went.If it'd been something I was hearing late at night and for the first time, I'd have thought it was somebody dying, or else something wild and dangerous.

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

My lungs are thick with the smoke of your absence.

He seemed full of some goodness she didn't understand

How far would you run with a piece of lead in your heart?

You have to have been in love to write poetry.

Close your eyes now,' the blind man said to me. I did it. I closed them just like he said.
'Are they closed?' he said. 'Don't fudge.'
'They're closed,' I said.
'Keep them that way,' he said. He said, 'Don't stop now. Draw.'
So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now.
Then he said, 'I think that's it. I think you got it,' he said. 'Take a look. What do you think?'
But I had my eyes closed. I thought I'd keep them that way for a little longer. I thought it was something I ought to do.
'Well? he said. 'Are you looking?'
My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn't feel like I was inside anything.
'It's really something,' I said.

He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.

I crack the other egg.
Surely we have diminished one another.

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

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

Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.

Weeks later, she said: 'The guy was about middle-aged. All his things right there in his yard. No lie. We got real pissed and danced. In the driveway. Oh, my God. Don't laugh. He played us these records. Look at this record-player. The old guy gave it to us. And all these crappy records. Will you look at this shit?'
She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying

In his better moments, Mr Baxter is a decent, ordinary guy - a guy you wouldn't mistake for anyone special. But he is special. In my book, he is. For one thing he has a full night's sleep behind him, and he's just embraced his wife before leaving for work. But even before he goes, he's already expected home a set number of hours later. True, in the grander scheme of things, his return will be an event of small moment - but an event nonetheless.

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.

I am too nervous to eat pie.

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.

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

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

But he understood it was over, and he felt able to let her go. He was sure their life together had happened in the way he said it had. But it was something that had passed. And that passing--though it seemed impossible and he'd fought against it--would become part of him now, too, as surely as anything else he'd left behind.

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

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

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

It's seldom anything turns out to be better than you expected it to be. Usually it's the other way around.

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

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

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they an best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason
if the worlds are in any way blurred
the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing 'weak specification'.