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

More quotes by 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
As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
Michael Cunningham
Image
The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.
Michael Cunningham
Image
It's the world, you live in it, even if some boy has made a fool of you.
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
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
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
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
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
Image
I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.
Michael Cunningham
Image
I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
Michael Cunningham
Image
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
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
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
Image
Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
Michael Cunningham
Image
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
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
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
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
Image
Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?
Michael Cunningham