Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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

There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?

and did you get what you wanted from this life even so? i did.

My life is going to change. I feel it.

The fiction I'm most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.

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

I guess my writing has changed as my life has.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

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.

When I'm fishing, I feel guilty that I'm not writing, and when I'm writing, I feel guilty that I'm not fishing. But when push comes to shove, I'll always take the writing.

What do any of us really know about love?

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.

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.

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.

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

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