Raymond Carver Quotes - Page 3

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

I've done as many as 20 or 30 drafts of a story. Never less than 10 or 12 drafts.

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

A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

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 life is going to change. I feel it.

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

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

You have to have been in love to write poetry.

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.

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

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

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.

My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.

She serves me a piece of it a few minutes out of the oven. A little steam rises from the slits on top. Sugar and spice - cinnamon - burned into the crust. But she's wearing these dark glasses in the kitchen at ten o'clock in the morning - everything nice - as she watches me break off a piece, bring it to my mouth, and blow on it. My daughter's kitchen, in winter. I fork the pie in and tell myself to stay out of it. She says she loves him. No way could it be worse.

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.

In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldnt turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.

What do any of us really know about love?

That was in Crescent City, California, up near the Oregon border. I left soon after. But today I was thinking of that place, of Crescent City, and of how I was trying out a new life there with my wife, and how, in the barber's chair that morning, I had made up my mind to go. I was thinking today about the calm I felt when I closed my eyes and let the barber's fingers move through my hair, the sweetness of those fingers, the hair already starting to grow.

I am too nervous to eat pie.

I'm moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.

Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He'd said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life.

I guess my writing has changed as my life has.

Writers will be judged by what they write.

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