Quote

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

Michael Cunningham

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
I have no useful theories about love and marriage.
Michael Cunningham
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We always worry about the wrong things, don't we?
Michael Cunningham
Image
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
Image
One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
Michael Cunningham
Image
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
Image
There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined.
Michael Cunningham
Image
Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself.
Michael Cunningham
Image
What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. Everything is gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
Michael Cunningham
Image
The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.
Michael Cunningham
Image
I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years.
Michael Cunningham
Image
Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.
Michael Cunningham
Image
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
Image
I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.
Michael Cunningham
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It's the world, you live in it, even if some boy has made a fool of you.
Michael Cunningham