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

We always worry about the wrong things, don't we?

— Michael Cunningham

“Beauty is a whore. I prefer money.”

— 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

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

— Michael Cunningham

I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.

— Michael Cunningham

You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for…

— Michael Cunningham

This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.

— Michael Cunningham

“It's the solitude that slays you. Maybe because you'd expected ruin to arrive in a grander and more romantic form.”

— Michael Cunningham

“Who has more power than a child? She can be as cruel as she wants to be. He can't.”

— Michael Cunningham

What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other…

— Michael Cunningham

I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

— Michael Cunningham

“Mizzy has, again, wandered into the garden, like a child who feels no fealty to adult conversation.”

— Michael Cunningham

“He seemed to believe that from such humble, inert elements as flour, shortening, and drab little envelopes of yeast, life itself could…

— Michael Cunningham

“It's hardly ever the destination we've been anticipating, is it? Our hopes may seem unrealized, but we were in all likelihood hoping…

— Michael Cunningham

“...Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in…

— Michael Cunningham

A stray fact: insects are not drawn to candle flames, they are drawn to the light on the far side of the…

— Michael Cunningham

“Tyler. His handsome, lion-eyed ravagement. His capacity for devotion. Which is so sexy. Why do so many gay men lack that? Why…

— Michael Cunningham

“I sometimes wonder how you live with such a modest sense of romance," Barrett says. "Superstition and romance are not the same…

— Michael Cunningham

Before there was any talk of a movie, people would sometimes ask me what actors I would imagine playing these characters. And…

— Michael Cunningham

“If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness.…

— Michael Cunningham

I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember…

— Michael Cunningham

“It's impossible to imagine, isn't it? Most men probably go through the same motions, more or less, but what's in their minds,…

— Michael Cunningham

“What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass,…

— Michael Cunningham

“I knew how I sounded - slow and oafish, like the cousin who gets ditched and goes on playing alone, as if…

— Michael Cunningham

“There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lived seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open…

— Michael Cunningham

Any other vexations to report?" he asks. "I love the word 'vexations.'" "It's the 'x.' Nice to jump off a 'v' and…

— Michael Cunningham

“Peter glances out at the falling snow. Oh, little man. You have brought down your house not through passion but by neglect.…

— Michael Cunningham

You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire - that contains a…

— Michael Cunningham

“Clarissa will be bereaved, deeply lonely, but she will not die. She will be too much in love with life, with London.…

— Michael Cunningham

“Martha’s Vineyard had fossil deposits one million centuries old. The northern reach of Cape Cod, however, on which my house sat, the…

— Michael Cunningham

“Wherever you go, Provincetown will always take you back, at whatever age and in whatever condition. Because time moves somewhat differently there,…

— Michael Cunningham

“I’ve learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself. It is…

— Michael Cunningham

“This is one of the most singular experiences, waking on what feels like a good day, preparing to work but not yet…

— 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

“I’m not this unusual,” she said. “It’s just my hair.” She looked at Bobby and she looked at me, with an expression…

— Michael Cunningham

The kiss was innocent--innocent enough--but it was also full of something not unlike what Virginia wants from London, from life; it was…

— Michael Cunningham