Raymond Carver Quotes - Page 2

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'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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I am a cigarette with a body attached to it

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.

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

What good are insights? They only make things worse.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.

I’d like to go out in the front yard and shout something. “None of this is worth it!” That’s what I’d like people to hear.

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.