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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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Michael Cunningham
Age: 71
Born: 1952
Born: November 6
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Firsts
Book
Suspect
First
Suspects
Great
Kiss
Way
Kissing
Anybody
Reader
Serious

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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.
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As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
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Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself.
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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.
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Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?
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You can't find peace by avoiding life.
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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.
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The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.
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It's the world, you live in it, even if some boy has made a fool of you.
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Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
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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?
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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.
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we become the stories we tell ourselves
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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.
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We always worry about the wrong things, don't we?
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There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.
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The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.
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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.
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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.
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..this indiscriminate love feels entirely serious to her, as if everything in the world is part of a vast, inscrutable intention and everything in the world has its own secret name, a name that cannot be conveyed in language but is simply the sight and feel of the thing itself.
Michael Cunningham