Raymond Carver Quotes & Sayings

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. — Raymond Carver

He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her. — Raymond Carver

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

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

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. — Raymond Carver

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

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. — Raymond Carver

For a long time I wanted to do the kind of work my dad did. He was going to ask his foreman at the mill to put me on after I graduated. So I worked at the mill for about six months. But I hated the work and knew from the first day I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. — Raymond Carver

Then i don't know I remembered how he was when he was nineteen, the way he looked, running across this field to where his dad sat on a tractor, hand over his eyes, watching Wes run toward him - Chef's House — Raymond Carver

In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldn't turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from. — Raymond Carver

My life is going to change. I feel it. — Raymond Carver

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

She won't give him back his look. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

But here is the thing. When he gets on me, I suddenly feel I am fat. I feel am terrifically fat, so fat that Rudy is a tiny thing and hardly there at all. — Raymond Carver

A small wax and sawdust log burned on the grate. A carton of five more sat ready on the hearth. He got up from the sofa and put them all in the fireplace. He watched until they flamed. Then he finished his soda and made for the patio door. On the way, he saw the pies lined up on the sideboard. He stacked them in his arms, all six, one for every ten times she had ever betrayed him. — Raymond Carver

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'. — Raymond Carver

I guess my writing has changed as my life has. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Raymond Carver

Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I've forgotten, I don't know for sure. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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

I don't fire up the prose. I just tell it straight and don't fool around with it. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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

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. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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

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. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

I lifted him out. I held him. I held that half of him. — Raymond Carver

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

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

The past is unclear. It's as if there is a film over those early years. I can't even be sure that the things I remember happening really happened to me. — Raymond Carver

life was a stone cutting and grinding... — Raymond Carver

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

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. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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

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

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

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 — Raymond Carver

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

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

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

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 — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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

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. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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

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. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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

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

It was [John Gardner's] conviction that if the words in the story were blurred because of the author's insensitivity, carelessness, or sentimentality, then the story suffered from a tremendous handicap. But there was something even worse and something that must be avoided at all costs: if the words and the sentiments were dishonest, the author was faking it, writing about things he didn't care about or believe in, then nobody could ever care anything about it. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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

Writers will be judged by what they write. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

You have to have been in love to write poetry. — Raymond Carver

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

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

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

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. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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

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

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

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

I am a cigarette with a body attached to it — Raymond Carver

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. — Raymond Carver

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

He seemed full of some goodness she didn't understand — Raymond Carver

My lungs are thick with the smoke of your absence. — Raymond Carver

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

I'm always learning something. Learning never ends. — Raymond Carver

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

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. — Raymond Carver

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

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

You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk. — Raymond Carver