Raymond Carver Quotes

The telling of stories creates the real world.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

Fantasy for me as a kid was real, and I had a fantasy about what life was, whether it was sort of wicked and dire, or wholly normal, or whatever. Anything really close to home is not, it seems to me, what a good book should be about.

The power that you have as a storyteller is to be able to tell stories that are at once entertaining but also never lose sight of what's going on in the real world.

Film has to reflect the real world.

Characters work really well when they're reflective of the times that they're operating in.

As I keep saying, fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was.

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

Every fiction has its base in fact.

There's no division on my bookshelf between fiction and nonfiction. As far as I'm concerned, fiction is about the truth.

In fact, people seem to be tired of fiction now. There are so many other ways of exploring humanity - by ethnology, psychoanalysis, and so on. It's a little boring to make up stories. So many people think that it's better to be very close to reality and to recount one's life as it is rather than to fictionalize, as they say, that is to transpose, and therefore to cheat.

A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.

There is a real connection between Philosopy and fiction.

Photograph the world as it is. Nothing's more interesting than reality.

Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.

My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.

I like writing historical fiction.

I feel like we've found an interesting little corner of the sandbox here as far as the way we're telling sci-fi stories. I don't think it's limited to sci-fi - I think anything fantastic can co-exist with people you and I know, and not these hyper-real movie people.

I think Americans like the practical; they like the human. And I like both those things myself, and I try and put them into my books.

As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative - the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds.

Writers do draw inspiration from their own lives, which, quite frankly, might be more interesting than fiction.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.