Carver Quotes

• Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Thinking, Appreciated, Easy

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• It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud.

  Ira Glass

  Fun, Loud, Originals

  "Ira Glass: Live and Uncut". Interview with Ana Marie Cox And Joanna Dionis, www.motherjones.com. August 11, 1998.

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• We're doing Circle of Snakes, we open up with Skin Carver and we are throwing in Skull Forest later on.

  Glenn Danzig

  Snakes, Circles, Skulls

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• I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this; was it done with enjoyment, was the carver happy while he was about it?

  John Ruskin

  Believe, Ornaments, Done

  Seven Lamps of Architecture "The Lamp of Life" sec. 24 (1849)

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• George Washington Carver said: 'No one has the right to come into this world and go out of it without leaving distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it.' So if I'm going to be remembered for something, if I have a choice, I'd rather be known for standing up for my principles than shooting a jump shot.

  Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf

  Choices, Leaving, World

  Source: bleacherreport.com

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• The wood-carver can fashion whatever he will. Yet his products are but toys of the moment, to be glanced at in jest, not fashioned according to any precept or law. When times change, the carver too will change his style and make new trifles to hit the fancy of the passing day. But there is another kind of artist, who sets more soberly about his work, striving to give real beauty to the things which men actually use and to give to them the shape which tradition has ordained. This maker of real things must not for a moment be confused with the maker of idle toys.

  Murasaki Shikibu

  Fashion, Confused, Real

  Murasaki Shikibu (2011). “The Tale of Genji”, p.61, Tuttle Publishing

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• I am a cutter, you see. Also a snipper, a slicer, a carver, a jabber. I am a very special case. I have a purpose. My skin, you see, screams. It's covered with words - cook, cupcake, kitty, curls - as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh. I sometimes, but only sometimes, laugh. Getting out of the bath and seeing, out of the corner of my eye, down the side of a leg: baby-doll. Pulling on a sweater, and in a flash of my wrist: harmful. Why these words?

  Gillian Flynn

  Baby, Eye, Writing

  Gillian Flynn (2012). “The Novels of Gillian Flynn: Sharp Objects, Dark Places”, p.63, Broadway Books

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• It was stone carvers in ancient Rome, scribes in the Middle Ages, all the way through Gutenberg to the present day. That's a pretty long track record. More likely we may reach a point where each one of us is a typographer with our own custom proprietary typeface.

  Michael Bierut

  Rome, Long, Track

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

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• I am indebted to anyone who has ever written anything. I am indebted to the unknown carver of pictograms on a gallery of stone panels, which I encountered and stood in silence before on top of a distant odd-shaped hill in northern Kenya. For whatever reason the muses have most unexpectedly invited me to join this immense procession. I am humbled and delighted.

  Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  Silence, Kenya, Stones

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I love fiction. I like reading short stories. Cupcakes, pop songs, Polaroids, and short stories. They all raise and answer questions in a short space. I like Lorrie Moore. Amy Hempel. Tim O'Brien. Raymond Carver. All the heartbreakers.

  Laurel Nakadate

  Song, Reading, Heart

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Carver's best book yet! FROM A CHANGELING STAR combines deft characterization and fascinating extrapolation into a complex, compulsively readable thriller. I wish all science fiction novels could be this good.

  Craig Shaw Gardner

  Stars, Book, Fiction Novels

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• When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.

  Annie Dillard

  Real, Writing, Years

  Annie Dillard (2009). “The Writing Life”, p.3, Harper Collins

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• Those who work standing ... carpenters, sawyers, carvers, blacksmiths, masons ... are liable to varicose veins ... [because] the strain on the muscles is such that the circulation of the blood is retarded. Standing even for a short time proves exhausting compared with walking and running though it be for a long time ... Nature delights and is restored by alternating and varied actions.

  Bernardino Ramazzini

  Running, Health, Exercise

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• From a literary standpoint, I've been loving Raymond Carver's short stories, William Carlos Williams' poems, Richard Siken's 'Crush', John Fante, and Jim Harrison's book of ghazals. I love film and photography too, so many of my songs are very image rich from those influences.

  Greta Salpeter

  Crush, Photography, Song

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• I'm interested in dismantling the distinction between masculine and feminine writing both because I think it's a false distinction and, I think, ultimately an insulting one. It's as insulting to men as it is to women. I'm not sure what masculine writing would look like - I assume some combination of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. Writing can't be gendered in that way.

  Katie Kitamura

  Writing, Men, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I would be writing and trying to write like Joan Didion. Or if I was reading Raymond Carver. You know, strong stylists. But that's how you find your voice, is imitating other people. So things like that didn't embarrass me, because I thought, well, that's how it goes. That's how everyone learns.

  David Sedaris

  Strong, Reading, Writing

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Raymond Carver had the quote that I loved about how he felt that a short story was the moment right before someone's life was about to fall apart. You can't really do that with a novel, but with a story you're just left hanging.

  Molly Antopol

  Fall, Moments, Novel

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• That became my aesthetic - a very Chekhovian, American realist aesthetic in the tradition of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. The perfectible, realist story that had these somewhat articulate characters, a lot of silence, a lot of obscured suffering, a lot of manliness, a lot of drinking, a lot of divorces. As my writing went on, I shed a lot of those elements.

  Jess Row

  Drinking, Character, Divorce

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Island Records used what we built and tried to cash in on it which is so annoying. So it came time to do Carver City record and Island wanted to do it and we're just like "What's the point?" I mean, at that point they were even admitting like, "Yeah, we're just gonna do what we've always done."

  Jess Margera

  Mean, Islands, Cities

  Source: puregrainaudio.com

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• Black people have been qualified to be president for hundreds of years. George Washington Carver could have been president. I could go on with a list of black men that were qualified to be the president of the United States. So the Obama victory is progress for white people.

  Chris Rock

  Men, Years, White

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Jeffrey Carver imagines wonders and allows us to share his vision.

  Terry Carr

  Vision, Wonder, Imagine

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• Carved with figures strange and sweet, All made out of the carver's brain.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Sweet, Brain, Furniture

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2012). “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, p.52, Courier Corporation

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• Jeff Carver is a hard sf writer who gets it right-his science and his people are equally convincing. NEPTUNE CROSSING combines his strengths, from a chilling look at alien machine intelligence, to cutting-edge chaos theory, to the pangs of finite humans in the face of the infinite. If you like intriguing ideas delivered in an exciting plot, this is your meat.

  Gregory Benford

  Cutting, Ideas, People

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• Jane Francklyne, born in 1565, had lived for less than a month. She left very little behind. She was buried in the Ecton churchyard, but her father would hardly have paid a carver to engrave so small a stone. If not for the parish register, there would be no record that this Jane Francklyne had ever lived at all. History is what is written and can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by the earth.

  Jill Lepore

  Father, Records, Earth

  Jill Lepore (2013). “Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin”, p.16, Vintage

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• The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.

  Christine Quinn

  Dog, Kings, School

  "Leave a Place Setting for Ann". Interview with Philip Galanes, www.nytimes.com. May 9, 2013.

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