Carver’s world is something like a room in which the television is always on, unless you happen to be subjecting the neighbours to home movies. The ashtrays are overflowing. There may be an alcoholic, active or reformed, lying on the living-room sofa.
Authors Raymond Carver
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…Carver completely dispensed with the romantic egoism that made the Hemingway idiom such an awkward model for other writers in the late 20th century. The cafes and pensions and battlefields of Europe were replaced by trailer parks and apartment complexes, the glamorous occupations by dead-end jobs.
Frank Kermode
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For better or worse, I am an instinctual writer rather than a writer working out a programme or finding stories to fit particular themes. There are certain obsessions that I have and try to give voice to: the relationships between men and women, why we oftentimes lose the things we put the most value on, the mismanagement of our own inner resources.
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I guess I came to the hard realization that art doesn’t make anything happen. No. I don’t believe for a minute in that absurd Shelleyan nonsense having to do with poets as the “unacknowledged legislators” of this world. What an idea! Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.
Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver’s opinions on others
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It’s nice to think of Updike’s idealized reader. But except for the early stories, I don’t think it’s a young boy in a small Midwestern town who’s reading Updike […] I think Updike is writing for the audience that John Cheever said he was writing for, “intelligent, adult men and women,” wherever they live.
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I like it when there is some feeling of threat or sense of menace in short stories. I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it’s good for the circulation.
John Updike
Short Cuts