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
people alive staying-alive
That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.
children kids math
All over China, parents tell their children to stop complaining and to finish their quadratic equations and trigonometric functions because there are sixty-five million American kids going to bed with no math at all.
light flames facts
A stray fact: insects are not drawn to candle flames, they are drawn to the light on the far side of the flame, they go into the flame and sizzle to nothingness because they're so eager to get to the light on the other side.
book giving parent
You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.
thinking two people
I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
party struggle book
We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep--it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself.
hours stills
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.
men people want
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.
hero stories
What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?
writing optimistic thinking
I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act.
writing should feels
A writer should always feel like he's in over his head
years three produce
I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years.
regret mean choices
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.
crush believe moving
It's the city's crush and heave that move you; its intricacy; its endless life. You know the story about Manhattan as a wilderness purchased for strings of beads, but you find it impossible not to believe that it has always been a city; that if you dug beneath it you would find the ruins of another, older city, and then another and another.