Michael Cunningham

“Beauty is a whore, I like money better.”

— Michael Cunningham

Sure, go ahead, simulate life, using only ink and paper.

— Michael Cunningham

I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act.

— Michael Cunningham

a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm

— Michael Cunningham

“It is the Morocco of America, the New Orleans of the north.”

— Michael Cunningham

we become the stories we tell ourselves

— Michael Cunningham

I think great poetry is enormously powerful.

— Michael Cunningham

I have no useful theories about love and marriage.

— Michael Cunningham

She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it.

— Michael Cunningham

As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.

— Michael Cunningham

What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?

— Michael Cunningham

The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.

— Michael Cunningham

Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I…

— Michael Cunningham

Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.

— Michael Cunningham

“In heaven, Lucas would be beautiful. He’d speak a language everyone understood.”

— Michael Cunningham

“The art we produce lives in queasy balance with the art we can imagine the art the room expects.”

— Michael Cunningham

“This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of…

— Michael Cunningham

Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is…

— Michael Cunningham

“That may have been when they took their vows: We are no longer siblings, we are mates, starship survivors, a two-man crew…

— Michael Cunningham

But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god,…

— Michael Cunningham

“It was either the wind or the spirit of the house itself, briefly unsettled by our nocturnal absence but to old to…

— Michael Cunningham

I know, speaking for myself, no matter what I'm able to do, no matter what book comes out and ends up on…

— Michael Cunningham

As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are…

— Michael Cunningham

“Who was it who said, the worst thing you can imagine is probably what's already happening? Shrink phrase. Not untrue, though.”

— Michael Cunningham

“There is no one there to see it. The world is doing what it always does, demonstrating itself to itself. The world…

— Michael Cunningham

There's the fact that American fiction is basically the most apolitical fiction on the globe. A South American writer wouldn't dare think…

— Michael Cunningham

If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions,…

— Michael Cunningham

There is just this for consolation: an hour here or there, when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst…

— Michael Cunningham

“I'm talking about a little truth-in-packaging here. To be perfectly frank, you don't quite look like yourself. And if you walk around…

— Michael Cunningham

Yes," she answers and does not move. She might, at this moment, be nothing but a floating intelligence; not even a brain…

— Michael Cunningham

“She pauses several treads from the bottom, listening, waiting; she is again possessed (it seems to be getting worse) by a dream-like…

— Michael Cunningham

“She knew she was going to have trouble believing in herself, in the room of her house, and when she glanced over…

— Michael Cunningham

“The Taylors have this gift for imperturbable presence. They are not nervous talkers. The Harrises, on the other hand, have always been…

— Michael Cunningham

“There is something exciting about this. Peter still doesn't want to have sex with Mizzy, but there is something thrilling about downing…

— Michael Cunningham

“We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump…

— Michael Cunningham

“Peter is still amazed at the degree to which a certain widening gyre of accolades can change an artist's work, literally change…

— Michael Cunningham

“It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that…

— Michael Cunningham

“One often feels exalted, expanded, in his presence. He is not one of those egotists who miniaturize others. He is the opposite…

— Michael Cunningham

“A sensation rose in him, a high tingling of his blood. There came a wave, a wind that recognized him, that did…

— Michael Cunningham

“He feels, as he sometimes does, as most people must, a presence in the room, what he can only think of as…

— Michael Cunningham