Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver
Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr.was an American short-story writer and poet. Carver contributed to the revitalization of the American short story in literature during the 1980s...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth25 May 1938
CityClatskanie, OR
CountryUnited States of America
basis fiction interested life reason respect seems suppose
Most of my stories, if not all of them, have some basis in real life. That's the kind of fiction I'm most interested in. I suppose that's one reason I don't have much respect for fiction that seems to be game playing.
except follow given poetry worse writer
When you're writing fiction or poetry... it really comes down to this: indifference to everything except what you're doing... A young writer could do worse than follow the advice given in those lines.
extent trying
In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldn't turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.
inside men point relationships view women
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.
marriage writers
I think marriage is one of those things that writers draw on, one of those emotional reservoirs that go way back.
writing secret knows
Write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?
writing insightful stories
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.
long chance enough
there isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails.
writing
That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
dream wake-up knows
Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
water life-and-death rising
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.
i-love-you want earth
And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.
writing heart character
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.
water mind together
The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.