Raymond Carver on words and punctuation

Raymond Carver, writing in The New York Times in 1981:

That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer’s own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason — if the words are in any way blurred — the reader’s eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved.

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[1983 or so: I missed hearing Raymond Carver read. It was a late Friday afternoon, it had been a long day, I didn’t want to schlep down to the Northeastern campus. Some other time, I thought. There never was one.]