Raymond Carver Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.

He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.

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

Don’t complain, don’t explain.

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

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.

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

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.

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