Raymond Carver Quotes

Novels allow me to create a whole world.

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

Well,the fun part of being a writer is that it's like making a wonderful film, with no limit on my budget. I can design the sets, the costume, the lightings, I write the script, and then I get to perform all the roles as I step into each character's skin, zip up, and adopt that point of view. So, to me, they are all compelling and fascinating.

The great thing about writing is, if you don't like the world, we'll create a different one.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

I like it when I can hear directly from the writer: what they're seeing, what they're envisioning, and what their intention is.

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

I write what I write.

The things that I'm interested in directing are fiction, because then you're not married to a particular reality.

When you're writing, it's so absorbing. It's like a drop cloth goes over you, and the world outside falls away, but you do have a miniature version of the world, your own world, that you actually have some control over. I love to work.

It's a very different thing when you're creating the world as opposed to when you're just part of the world. I love the detail of it, the problem-solving of it, and I love working with actors.

In the most self-protective of ways, I don't think about the reader when I'm writing - I just think about the story.

I think writing gives me creative freedom.

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).

Honestly, I don't try to guess at what most people want. I don't think I'd guess right, and I just think that that's not a good recipe for storytelling. I try to write what I like, what I think my friends would like.

I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.

I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.

What I didn't realize when I was in school and what I suspect a lot of young writers today don't get either is that you have to create the world that you want to exist in as an artist.

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.

The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.

I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.