Carver on short stories

“If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, 'created of warm blood and nerves' as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.”

- Raymond Carver, from Call if You Need me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose