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There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.
Michael Cunningham
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Michael Cunningham
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 6
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Part
Still
Singular
Time
Clearly
Seemed
Perfection
Promise
Perfect
Stills
More quotes by Michael Cunningham
On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.
Michael Cunningham
People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.
Michael Cunningham
I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself: So, this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then.
Michael Cunningham
But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another.
Michael Cunningham
One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
Michael Cunningham
I think of the people who commit these acts as children. They're in their 20s, but like certain children, they have been told only one story, over and over. Like most children, they believe in an easily identifiable good and evil, and like most children, they are capable of unthinkable cruelty.
Michael Cunningham
Any other vexations to report? he asks. I love the word 'vexations.' It's the 'x.' Nice to jump off a 'v' and bite into an 'x' like that. Just the usual ones, she says. How was the weekend? Vexing. Not really, I just wanted to say it. You?
Michael Cunningham
This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.
Michael Cunningham
Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed.
Michael Cunningham
The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.
Michael Cunningham
Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
Michael Cunningham
I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English language until it starts to behave in some way that vaguely matches my intentions.
Michael Cunningham
Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write.
Michael Cunningham
Please, God, send me something to adore.
Michael Cunningham
We always worry about the wrong things, don't we?
Michael Cunningham
. . . he felt himself entering a moment so real he could only run toward it, shouting.
Michael Cunningham
Accept that, like many men, you have a streak of the homoerotic in you. Why would you, why would anyone, want to be that straight?
Michael Cunningham
we become the stories we tell ourselves
Michael Cunningham
I just don't feel much interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
Michael Cunningham
Her cake is a failure, but she is loved anyway. She is loved, she thinks, in more or less the way the gifts will be appreciated: because they have been given with good intentions , because they exist, because they are part of a world in which one wants what one gets.
Michael Cunningham
