#carve

After moving his family from Yakima to Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first "real writer" he had ever met. "He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled in his preface to Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist (1983). "I see that gift now as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student "close, line-by-line criticism" and taught him a set of values that was "not negotiable." Among these values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On Moral Fiction (1978) decried the "nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing. "In the best fiction," he wrote "the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the ‘moved’ character, the one to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of the metafictional "funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company, concentrating instead on what he called "those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver declared himself a humanist. "Art is not self-expression," he insisted, "it’s communication. ↗

— William L. Stull

#carver #chekhov #chico-state #john-gardner #paradise

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features. ↗

— Primo Levi

#carved #change #erased #even #extraneous

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. ↗

— Michelangelo

#angel #carved #free #him #i

Kids don't have ruts yet that adults have carved into their minds. They're born logical. Crooked thinking has to be taught. ↗

— James P. Hogan

#carved #crooked #into #kids #logical

For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished freedom is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while there was still time. ↗

— George Sutherland

#carved #epitaph #failed #forth #freedom

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: 'It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity. ↗

— James Keller

#ago #bear #carved #cell #condemned

I was determined to carve out a music of my own. I didn't want to copy anybody. ↗

— Bill Monroe

#carve #copy #determined #i #music

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

#hooks #no-hands #viewfinder #love

But how carve way i' the life that lies before, If bent on groaning ever for the past? ↗

— Robert Browning

#bent #carve #ever #groaning #how

As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife's money and little bits I was picking up for journalism. ↗

— Jonathan Coe

#carve #had #i #journalism #little