Raymond Carver quotes

Raymond Carver was an American writer renowned for his short stories and poetry. His minimalist style and focus on the lives of ordinary people had a profound influence on late 20th-century American literature. He is celebrated for collections such as "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." Here are 57 of his quotes:

But he stays by the window, remembering that life. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else-the cold and where he'd go in it-was outside, for a while anyway.

Raymond Carver

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

Raymond Carver

You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.

Raymond Carver

I'm moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.

Raymond Carver

She won't give him back his look.

Raymond Carver

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.

Raymond Carver

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.

Raymond Carver

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.

Raymond Carver

I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.

Raymond Carver

You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?

Raymond Carver

Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.

Raymond Carver

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.

Raymond Carver

I guess my writing has changed as my life has.

Raymond Carver

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

Raymond Carver

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.

Raymond Carver

There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.

Raymond Carver

I am too nervous to eat pie.

Raymond Carver

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

Raymond Carver

What good are insights? They only make things worse.

Raymond Carver

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.

Raymond Carver

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.

Raymond Carver

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

Raymond Carver