Raymond Carver Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• 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

  Raymond Carver (2015). “Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories”, p.25, Vintage

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

  Raymond Carver

  Writing, Secret, Knows

  Raymond Carver, Marshall Bruce Gentry, William L. Stull (1990). “Conversations with Raymond Carver”, p.41, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

  Raymond Carver

  Writing

  Raymond Carver (2015). “Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose”, p.102, Vintage

• 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

  Raymond Carver (2016). “Where I'm Calling From”, p.14, Random House

• A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

  Raymond Carver

  Writing, Imagination, Littles

  Raymond Carver, Bob Adelman (1994). “Carver Country: The World of Raymond Carver”, Arcade Publishing

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

  Raymond Carver

  Writing, World, Very Good

  Raymond Carver (2015). “Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories”, p.23, Vintage

• 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

  Raymond Carver (2001). “Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose”, Vintage

• My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.

  Raymond Carver

  Writing, Responsibility, Stories

• I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

  Raymond Carver

  Writing, Thinking, Stories

  Raymond Carver (2015). “Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories”, p.27, Vintage

• I guess my writing has changed as my life has.

  Raymond Carver

  Writing, Changed

• 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

  Raymond Carver (2015). “Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose”, p.99, Vintage

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

  Raymond Carver

  Writing, Literature, Crafts

• 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.

  Raymond Carver

  Writing, Admire, Wells

• You have to have been in love to write poetry.

  Raymond Carver

  Writing, Been In Love, Has Beens

  Raymond Carver (2015). “All of Us: The Collected Poems”, p.57, Vintage

• 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

• Writers will be judged by what they write.

  Raymond Carver

  Writing, Judged

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