Raymond Carver Writing Quotations

I guess my writing has changed as my life has.

In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldnt turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.

Writers will be judged by what they write.

Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.

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

You have to have been in love to write poetry.

A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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