Excerpt from The Paris Review Interview with Raymond Carver

INTERVIEWER:

Do you regret a lot of things that happened back then when things were so bad?

CARVER:

I can't change anything now. 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 do things differently there. Things happen. I really do feel I've had two different lives.

INTERVIEWER:

Can you talk a little about literary influences, or at least name some writers whose work you greatly admire?

CARVER:

Ernest Hemingway is one. The early stories. "Big Two-Hearted River," "Cat in the Rain," "The Three-Day Blow," "Soldier's Home," lots more. Chekhov. I suppose he's the writer whose work I most admire. But who doesn't like Chekhov? I'm talking about his stories now, not the plays. His plays move too slowly for me. Tolstoy. Any of his short stories, novellas, and Anna Karenina. Not War and Peace. Too slow. But The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Master and Man, "How Much Land Does A Man Need?" Tolstoy is the best there is. Isaac Babel, Flannery O'Connor, Frank O'Connor. James Joyce's Dubliners. John Cheever Madame Bovary. Last year I reread that book, along with a new translation of Flaubert's letters written while he was composing - no other word for it - Madame Bovary. Conrad. Updike's Too Far To Go. And there are wonderful writers I've come across in the last year or two like Tobias Wolff. His book of stories In the Garden of the North American Martyrs is just wonderful. Max Schott. Joy Williams. Bobbie Ann Mason. Did I mention her? Well, she's good and worth mentioning twice. Harold Pinter. V.S. Prichett. Years ago I read something in a letter by Chekhov that impressed me. It was a piece of advice to one of his many correspondents, and it went something like this: Friend, you don't have to write about extraordinary people who accomplish extraordinary and memorable deeds. (Understand I was in college at the time and reading plays about princes and dukes and the overthrow of kingdoms. Quests and the like, large undertakings to establish heroes in their rightful places. Novels with larger-than-life heros.) But reading what Chekhov had to say in that letter, and in other letters of his as well, and reading his stories, made me see things differently than I had before. Not long afterwards I read a play and a number of stories by Maxim Gorky, and he simply reinforced in his work what Chekhov had to say. Richard Ford is another fine writer. He's primarily a novelist, but he's also written stories and essays. He's a friend. I have a lot of friends who are good friends, and some of them are good writers. Some not so good.

INTERVIEWER:

What do you do in that case? I mean, how do you handle that - if one of your friends publishes something you don't like?

CARVER:

I don't say anything unless the friend asks me, and I hope he doesn't. But if you're asked you have to say what you think, of course. But you try to say it in a way that it doesn't wreck the friendship. You want your friends to do well and write the best they can. But sometimes their work is a disappointment. You want everything to go well for them, but you have this dread that maybe it won't and there's not much you can do.