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
bottomless good interest
and didn't feel especially good at it but did feel a kind of bottomless interest in the process, which has never ceased.
creation dogged number powerful various walt
Like any powerful creation, can be used in a number of ways... in this book, which chronicles various dissolutions and breakages, there is still Walt Whitman, the dogged optimist.
equivalent fabulous form free human life nearest seemed simply star
A movie star seemed simply like the nearest equivalent we've got, we who live blessedly free of a monarchy, to that sense of the human form exalted, the life made fabulous simply by who and what the person is.
days dead great horses lying miraculous people regulation saying seven streets trash walked walt worked
People worked seven days for 12-14 hours, there was no regulation of any kind - there were no trash pick-ups, there were dead horses lying in the streets - and through all of this walked our great American whirling dervish, Walt Whitman, saying 'I find it all to my taste, I find it all miraculous and strange, and yes, even beautiful',
knew light literally next
It's like a light went off right at that moment, ... I could see my project. I knew I had something. I literally started working on it that next day.
difference entitled equally great impulse perfect remove trying
The only difference was one of them was trying to make a perfect cake and one of them was trying to write a great book. But if we remove that from the equation, it's the same impulse and they are equally entitled to their ecstasies and their despair.
characters clear people playing
Before there was any talk of a movie, people would sometimes ask me what actors I would imagine playing these characters. And the only thing I could ever say is: I have such a clear idea of these characters that they'd have to play themselves.
world
There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.
years lasts faces
Dear Leonard. To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.
stories
we become the stories we tell ourselves
sensations
She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it.
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.
years three produce
I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years.
hands raw-materials materials
This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.