Raymond Carver Quotes

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

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.

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

Writers will be judged by what they write.

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

That was in Crescent City, California, up near the Oregon border. I left soon after. But today I was thinking of that place, of Crescent City, and of how I was trying out a new life there with my wife, and how, in the barber's chair that morning, I had made up my mind to go. I was thinking today about the calm I felt when I closed my eyes and let the barber's fingers move through my hair, the sweetness of those fingers, the hair already starting to grow.

He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.

The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.

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

There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about.

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

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

Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.

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.

Write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?

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

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.

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

You have to have been in love to write poetry.

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.

Don’t complain, don’t explain.

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.

My life is going to change. I feel it.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

She won't give him back his look.