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This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.

Michael Cunningham

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Michael Cunningham
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 6
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Material
Materials
Hand
Future
Hands
Make

More quotes by Michael Cunningham

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Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.
Michael Cunningham
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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.
Michael Cunningham
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A certain slightly cruel disregard for the feelings of living people is simply part of the package. I think a writer, if hes any good, is not an entirely benign entity in the world.
Michael Cunningham
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The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.
Michael Cunningham
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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.
Michael Cunningham
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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.
Michael Cunningham
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You can't find peace by avoiding life.
Michael Cunningham
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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.
Michael Cunningham
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Dear Leonard. To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.
Michael Cunningham
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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.
Michael Cunningham
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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.
Michael Cunningham
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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?
Michael Cunningham
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I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
Michael Cunningham
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You could say I don't want for me be seen primarily as a gay writer. I've never hidden my sexuality. It matters that I'm gay, it matters that I'm white, it matters that I'm male, it matters that I'm American. But basically it's just less and less of a big deal.
Michael Cunningham
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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.
Michael Cunningham
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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.
Michael Cunningham
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I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.
Michael Cunningham
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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.
Michael Cunningham
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It's the world, you live in it, even if some boy has made a fool of you.
Michael Cunningham
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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