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
Michael Cunningham quotes about
kindness believe tired
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.
morning simple trying
What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted something alive and shocking enough that it could be a morning in somebody's life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that.
witch bohemian certain
a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm
perfection perfect promise
There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.
sexy jumping tragedy
Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed.
people alive staying-alive
That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.
ideas different kind
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.
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.
peace avoiding-death avoiding-pain
You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.
summer happens eighteen
That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed anything could happen, anything at all.
heart sorrow needs
Maybe it’s not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and gluttony and foolishness. You need the virtues, too—some sort of virtues—but we don’t care about Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov because they’re good. We care about them because they’re not admirable, because they’re us, and because great writers have forgiven them for it.
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.
death dimensions modest
Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
intend
We've been here for 150 years and we intend on being here 150 more.