Michael Cunningham
Michael Cunningham
Michael Cunningham is an American author and screenwriter. He is best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Cunningham is a senior lecturer of creative writing at Yale University...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth6 November 1952
CountryUnited States of America
almost chance change dead happiness lay less liked owe small taken welcoming
I'd have liked to tell him something I'd taken almost 60 years to learn: that we owe the dead even less than we owe the living, that our only chance of happiness - a small enough chance - lay in welcoming change
men want accepting
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?
book betrayed want
If you've really loved a book, or a movie for that matter, really loved it, what you want is that same book again, but as if you've never read it. And when you get something unfamiliar, you feel betrayed.
should-have fiction delight
Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear.
lying thinking two
People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.
book kissing first-kiss
I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.
thinking people feelings
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.
ink-and-paper paper ink
Sure, go ahead, simulate life, using only ink and paper.
rich lifestyle feels
I just don't feel much interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
book writing artist
The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.
book writing secret
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.
inspirational odds giving
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.
book tired world
She is, above all else, tired; she wants more than anything to return to her bed and her book. The world, this world, feels suddenly stunned and stunted, far from everything.
moving reading thinking
Yes," she answers and does not move. She might, at this moment, be nothing but a floating intelligence; not even a brain inside a skull, just a presence that perceives, as a ghoast might. Yes, she thinks, this is probably how it must feel to be a ghost. It's a little like reading, isn't it-that same sensation of knowing people, settings, situations, without playing any particular part beyond that of the willing observer.