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
hands raw-materials materials
This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.
running morning simple
What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.
running religious soul
If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance
sight names secret
..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.
kind possession command
She will remain sane and she will live as she was meant to live, richly and deeply, among others of her kind, in full possession and command of her gifts.
worry wrong-things
We always worry about the wrong things, don't we?
book years needs
I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I've learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself.
way firsts language
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.
love-and-marriage theory
I have no useful theories about love and marriage.
enemy dresses young
You grow weary of being treated as the enemy simply because you are not young anymore; because you dress unexceptionally.
grateful trying world
Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.
peace avoiding-death avoiding-pain
You can't find peace by avoiding life.
stars moving silly
Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.
love-is want mystery
Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?