Top 100 Raymond Carver Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Don’t complain, don’t explain.”

— Raymond Carver

2. “I’m always learning something. Learning never ends.”

— Raymond Carver

Featured in: Lifelong Learning Quotes

3. “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

4. “That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.”

— Raymond Carver

5. “A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don’t matter a damn anymore.”

— Raymond Carver

6. “It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love.”

— Raymond Carver

7. “My life is going to change. I feel it.”

— Raymond Carver

8. “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

9. “Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.”

— Raymond Carver

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

— Raymond Carver

11. “Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on.”

— Raymond Carver

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

— Raymond Carver

13. “But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window – maybe rearrange all the furniture.”

— Raymond Carver

14. “There is no answer. It’s okay. But even if it wasn’t okay, what am I supposed to do?”

— Raymond Carver

15. “It’s strange. You never start out life with the intention of becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat and a thief. Or a liar.”

— Raymond Carver

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

— Raymond Carver

17. “Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.”

— Raymond Carver

18. “Why don’t you kids dance? he decided to say, and then said it. “Why don’t you dance?”

— Raymond Carver

19. “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.”

— Raymond Carver

20. “Write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?”

— Raymond Carver

21. “What do any of us really know about love?”

— Raymond Carver

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

— Raymond Carver

23. “The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.”

— Raymond Carver

24. “You’ve got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?”

— Raymond Carver

25. “I dressed and went for a walk – determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer.”

— Raymond Carver

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

— Raymond Carver

27. “There are significant moments in everyone’s day that can make literature. That’s what you ought to write about.”

— Raymond Carver

28. “Art doesn’t have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it.”

— Raymond Carver

29. “I am too nervous to eat pie.”

— Raymond Carver

30. “Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you’re going to do a good job with it.”

— Raymond Carver

31. “Then I said something. I said, Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time. Just suppose. It doesn’t hurt to suppose. Say none of the other had ever happened. You know what I mean? Then what? I said.”

— Raymond Carver

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

32. “Nights without beginning that had no end. Talking about a past as if it’d really happened. Telling themselves that this time next year, this time next year, things were going to be different.”

— Raymond Carver

33. “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

34. “Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.”

— Raymond Carver

35. “I’ve done as many as 20 or 30 drafts of a story. Never less than 10 or 12 drafts.”

— Raymond Carver

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

36. “I’m moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.”

— Raymond Carver

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

— Raymond Carver

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

38. “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

39. “She won’t give him back his look.”

— Raymond Carver

40. “When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.”

— Raymond Carver

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

41. “I guess my writing has changed as my life has.”

— Raymond Carver

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

— Raymond Carver

43. “I said I’m sorry.” “Sorry isn’t good enough.”

— Raymond Carver

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

— Raymond Carver

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

— Raymond Carver

46. “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

47. “There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I’d like to know. I wish someone could tell me.”

— Raymond Carver

48. “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.”

— Raymond Carver

49. “The smooth stones you pick up and examine under the moon’s light have been made blue from the sea. Next morning when you pull them from your trouser pocket, they are still blue.”

— Raymond Carver

50. “You’re a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you’re a drunk.”

— Raymond Carver