Raymond Carver: I don’t fire up the prose. I just tell it straight and don’t fool around with it.

 I am a cigarette with a body attached to it.

-- Raymond Carver

 It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earrings with immense, even startling power.

-- Raymond Carver