(1938–1988)
U.S. short story writer and poet
Raymond Carver
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. The “paddle wheel of days,” John Ashberry has called it.
The Paris Review Interviews, vol. III (New York: Picador, 2008), 230.
I can’t afford to regret. That life is simply gone now, and I can’t regret its passing. I have to live in the present. The life back then is gone just as surely—it’s as remote to me as if it had happened to somebody I read about in a nineteenth-century novel. I don’t spend more than five minutes a month in the past. The past really is a foreign country, and they do things differently there.
The Paris Review Interviews, vol. III (New York: Picador, 2008), 235.