RAYMOND CARVER

Most of my stories, if not all of them, have some basis in real life. That's the kind of fiction I'm most interested in. I suppose that's one reason I don't have much respect for fiction that seems to be game playing.

When I'm fishing, I feel guilty that I'm not writing, and when I'm writing, I feel guilty that I'm not fishing. But when push comes to shove, I'll always take the writing.

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.

When you're writing fiction or poetry... it really comes down to this: indifference to everything except what you're doing... A young writer could do worse than follow the advice given in those lines.

When I'm writing, I write every day. It's lovely when that's happening. One day dovetailing into the next. Sometimes I don't even know what day of the week it is.

It's something that I feel I know about, relationships between men and women. I like to write from the woman's point of view now and again, to get inside her head, to feel what she's feeling.

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.

For a long time I wanted to do the kind of work my dad did. He was going to ask his foreman at the mill to put me on after I graduated. So I worked at the mill for about six months. But I hated the work and knew from the first day I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life.

I think marriage is one of those things that writers draw on, one of those emotional reservoirs that go way back.

I guess my writing has changed as my life has.

The fiction I'm most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.

In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldn't turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.

That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

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

What do any of us really know about love?

Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.

And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

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

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

A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house. Except for the chrome hooks, he was an ordinary-looking man of fifty or so.

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.

I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.

Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.

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.

All of us, all of us, all of us trying to save our immortal souls, some ways seemingly more round about and mysterious than others. We are having a good time here. But hope all will be revealed soon.