Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short-story writer and poet. Carver contributed to the revitalization of the American short story during the 1980s.
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.
I've done as many as 20 or 30 drafts of a story. Never less than 10 or 12 drafts.
You're. . . writing for other writers to an extent-the dead writers whose work you admire, as well as the living writers you like to read.
There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?
There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.
That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
She won't give him back his look.
and did you get what you wanted from this life even so? i did.
Write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?
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.
there isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails.
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.
The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
Art doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it.
Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it.
Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
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.
This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.
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.