Raymond Carver Quotes That Are poetic, minimalist and emotional

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.

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.

The places where water comes together with other water.

Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.

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'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.

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.

There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature.

That's what you ought to write about.

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

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

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

I am a cigarette with a body attached to it

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.

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.

You have to have been in love to write poetry.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

My life is going to change. I feel it.

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

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

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

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