Quote

People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.

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
Less
Two
Wells
Well
Negotiating
Way
Trick
Think
Tricks
Thinking
Lies
People
Lying

More quotes by Michael Cunningham

Image
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
Image
I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.
Michael Cunningham
Image
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
Image
One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
Michael Cunningham
Image
I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years.
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 become the stories we tell ourselves
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
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
Image
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?
Michael Cunningham
Image
. . . he felt himself entering a moment so real he could only run toward it, shouting.
Michael Cunningham
Image
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
Image
Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.
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
Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.
Michael Cunningham
Image
a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm
Michael Cunningham
Image
Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed.
Michael Cunningham
Image
Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
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
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