Michael Cunningham Quotes
The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.
There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.
I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.
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.
I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.
One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.
Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself.
The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.
People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.
As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
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.
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.
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.
What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.
Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.
There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.
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.
Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.
You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.
What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half.
Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.
This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.
Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?
Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed.
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.
. . . he felt himself entering a moment so real he could only run toward it, shouting.
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.
That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed anything could happen, anything at all.
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.
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.
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.