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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.

Michael Cunningham

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Michael Cunningham
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 6
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Easily
Youth
Perhaps
Devotions
Away
Arbitrarily
Give
Extravagance
Giving
Mistaken
Always
Assumption
Devotion

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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.
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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.
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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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I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years.
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The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.
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I am beginning to understand the true difference between youth and age. Young people have time to make plans and think of new ideas. Older people need their whole energy to keep up with what’s already been set in motion.
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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?
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Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed.
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We’d hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves.
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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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we become the stories we tell ourselves
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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.
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You can't find peace by avoiding life.
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These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect everybody's little display of genius.
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We always worry about the wrong things, don't we?
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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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One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
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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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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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As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
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