Raymond Carver Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“I'm moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.”
-- Raymond Carver

#Moving #Nevada

“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

#Love #Moving #Heart

“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

#Writing #Insightful #Stories

“Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.”
-- Raymond Carver

#Dream #Wake Up

“Write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?”
-- Raymond Carver

#Writing #Secret

“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.”
-- Raymond Carver

#Hate #Wife #Wish

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

#Long #Chance #Enough

“He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.”
-- 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

#Water #Life And Death #Rising

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

#Writing

“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

#Writing #Heart #Character

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

#Thinking #Honey #Watches

“Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.”
-- Raymond Carver

#Morning #Lying #Book

“The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.”
-- Raymond Carver

#Water #Mind #Together

“I am a cigarette with a body attached to it”
-- Raymond Carver

#Body #Cigarette

“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

#Talking #Ashamed #Feels

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

#Different #Wells #Bottom

“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

#Memories #Believe #Laughing

“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

#Dream #Morning #Insomnia

“My life is going to change. I feel it.”
-- Raymond Carver

#Life Is #Feels

“A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.”
-- Raymond Carver

#Writing #Imagination #Littles

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

#Writing #World #Very Good

“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

#Writing #Expression #Talking

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

#Jobs #Effort #Good Job

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

#Symphony #Remember

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

#Responsibility #Stories #Distraction

“I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.”
-- Raymond Carver

#Ends #Always Learning

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

#Art #Fierce #Pleasure

“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

#Writing #Want #Poet

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

#Writing #Trying #World