Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short-story writer and poet. Carver contributed to the revitalization of the American short story during the 1980s.
What do any of us really know about love?
Art doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it.
When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.
You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.
Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.
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.
In short, everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well.
Writers will be judged by what they write.
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.
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 circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.
Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.
Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
I dressed and went for a walk - determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer.
I am a cigarette with a body attached to it
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 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.
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.
That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
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.