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As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
Michael Cunningham
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Michael Cunningham
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 6
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Sentences
Opening
Writers
Authority
Reader
Speak
Must
Sentence
Readers
More quotes by 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
The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.
Michael Cunningham
This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.
Michael Cunningham
Man, he said, I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want. What do we want? I asked blurrily. Aw, man, you know, he said. We just want, well, the same things these people wanted. What was that? He shrugged. To live, I guess, he said.
Michael Cunningham
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
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
It's the world, you live in it, even if some boy has made a fool of you.
Michael Cunningham
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.
Michael Cunningham
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
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
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
I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
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
Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?
Michael Cunningham
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
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
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
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
Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
Michael Cunningham
You can't find peace by avoiding life.
Michael Cunningham
