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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
Perfect
Stills
Part
Still
Singular
Time
Clearly
Seemed
Perfection
Promise

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Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself.
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What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.
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I just don't feel much interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
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I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
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What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. And there it is... It was death. I chose life.
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Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?
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You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.
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People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.
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As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
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Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.
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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.
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One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
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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?
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I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.
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Perhaps, in the extravagance of youth, we give away our devotions easily and all but arbitrarily, on the mistaken assumption that we’ll always have more to give.
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I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years.
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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.
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Please, God, send me something to adore.
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This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.
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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.
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