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Author: Raymond Carver
Quotes of Author: Raymond Carver
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  1. Raymond Carver _ Call If You Need Me: The

    Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they an best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason -- if the worlds are in any way blurred -- the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing 'weak specification'."
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  2. Raymond Carver _ Where I'm Calling from: New

    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.
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  3. Raymond Carver

    Sai bene che non sogno.Ma ieri notte ho sognato che assistevamo a un funerale nel mare. All'inizio ero attonito. Poi pieno di rimpianti. Ma t
    lovesea

  4. Raymond Carver _ Call If You Need Me: The

    It was {John Gardner's} conviction that if the words in the story were blurred because of the author's insensitivity, carelessness, or sentimentality, then the story suffered from a tremendous handicap. But there was something even worse and something that must be avoided at all costs: if the words and the sentiments were dishonest, the author was faking it, writing about things he didn't care about or believe in, then nobody could ever care anything about it.
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  5. Raymond Carver _ What We Talk About When We

    A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house.
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  6. Raymond Carver

    Your face, your mouth, your shoulderinconceivable to me now!Where did they go? It's likeI dreamed them. The stones we broughthome from the beach lie face upon the windowsill, cooling.Come home. Do you hear

  7. Raymond Carver _ What We Talk About When We

    But I guess even the knights were vessels to someone. Isn't that the way it worked? But then everyone is always a vessel to someone.
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  8. Raymond Carver _ All of Us: The Collected Poems

    There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.
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  9. Raymond Carver _ Call If You Need Me: The

    V.S. Pritchett's definition of a short story is 'something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.' Notice the 'glimpse' part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse gives life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we're lucky -- that word again -- have even further ranging consequences and meaning. The short story writer's task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. He'll bring his intelligence and literary skill to bear {his talent}, his sense of proportion and sense of the fitness of things: of how things out there really are and how he sees those things -- like no one else sees them. And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right they can hit all the notes.
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  10. Raymond Carver _ What We Talk About When We

    We opened our eyes and turned in bed to take a good look at each other. We both knew it then. We'd reached the end of something, and the thing was to find out where new to start.
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  11. Raymond Carver

    Fear of seeing a police car pull into the drive.Fear of falling asleep at night.Fear of not falling asleep.Fear of the past rising up.Fear of the present taking flight.Fear of the telephone that rings in the dead of night.Fear of electrical storms.Fear of the cleaning woman who has a spot on her cheek!Fear of dogs I've been told won't bite.Fear of anxiety!Fear of having to identify the body of a dead friend.Fear of running out of money.Fear of having too much, though people will not believe this.Fear of psychological profiles.Fear of being late and fear of arriving before anyone else.Fear of my children's handwriting on envelopes.Fear they'll die before I do, and I'll feel guilty.Fear of having to live with my mother in her old age, and mine.Fear of confusion.Fear this day will end on an unhappy note.Fear of waking up to find you gone.Fear of not loving and fear of not loving enough.Fear that what I love will prove lethal to those I love.Fear of death.Fear of living too long

  12. Raymond Carver _ What We Talk About When We

    Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He'd said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life.
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