Quotes from Michael Cunningham

Yeah, right, sweetheart, it's a wing, I'm part angel, but trust me, the rest is pure devil.

They hope they'll learn to be happier together. They also yearn, sometimes, for the point at which misery becomes so profound as to leave them no alternative.

Were you relieved, maybe just a little, when they lifted you up (you weighed almost nothing by then) and shoved you into the oven? Did it seem unanticipated but right, somehow - did it strike you as satisfying, as a fate finally realized - when they slammed the door behind you?

As most writers know, it's one of the greatest feelings. It's rare and horribly elusive but every now and then, there it is, where you know what to do next and you make something. There's nothing to compare it to."-Michael Cunningham

She'd taken on the obligation to be a treasure. And the strain was starting to show. People paid a price for this kind of orderly existence, all this obedience.

I'm sure there are people who are content to run errands and report for work on time and wait, with an enlivening eagerness, for the lunch bell. I wish them well. They have, however, never been the subjects of novels, and in all likelihood, will never be.

Better, then, to go light on the sexual particulars, and think instead of who's winning and who's losing at any given point. How is power being exchanged here? I want to say, "Who's on top?" But that would of course be sleazy, and just generally beneath me...

But then again, in addition to paper and cardboard...a little illuminated box, that contains thousands and thousands of stories? People aren't fascinated by that? Really?

M? impresioneaz? efortul,nu obiectul.S? cer ceva rar È™i valoros ar însemna s? transform devotamentul în obligaÈ›ie.

Beauty and dignity were illusions fostered by the company of children, sustained for the benefit of children.

I love movies, I love television, I love narratives of all kinds.

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.

A certain slightly cruel disregard for the feelings of living people is simply part of the package. I think a writer, if he's any good, is not an entirely benign entity in the world.

Accept that, like many men, you have a streak of the homoerotic in you. Why would you, why would anyone, want to be that straight?

I know, speaking for myself, no matter what I'm able to do, no matter what book comes out and ends up on paper, I always had something bigger and grander in my head.

I have no useful theories about love and marriage.

If you've really loved a book, or a movie for that matter, really loved it, what you want is that same book again, but as if you've never read it. And when you get something unfamiliar, you feel betrayed.

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.

You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire - that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it's just this book.

Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest.

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.

Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things.

I just don't feel much interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

I have no useful theories about love and marriage.