Michael Cunningham Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

  Michael Cunningham

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Michael Cunningham (1998). “The Hours: A Novel”, p.69, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

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

  Michael Cunningham

  Healing, Writing, Optimistic

• A writer should always feel like he's in over his head

  Michael Cunningham

  Writing, Should, Feels

• At the risk, then, of being shunned by some of my gloomier peers, I venture to tell you that writers work like demons, suffer greatly, and are also happy, in unmistakable ways, some of the time. If we had no knowledge of happiness, our novels wouldn't sufficiently resemble real life. Some of us are even made a little bit happy, on occasion, by the writing process itself. I mean, really, if there wasn't some sort of enjoyment to be derived, would any of us keep doing it?

  Michael Cunningham

  Real, Writing, Mean

• The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.

  Michael Cunningham

  Book, Writing, Artist

  Michael Cunningham (2014). “The Snow Queen: A Novel”, p.111, Macmillan

• I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.

  Michael Cunningham

  Regret, Writing, Mean

  Michael Cunningham (1998). “The Hours: A Novel”, p.67, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

• We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep--it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself.

  Michael Cunningham

  Party, Struggle, Book

  Michael Cunningham (1998). “The Hours: A Novel”, p.225, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

• 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.

  Michael Cunningham

  War, Book, Writing

• There's the fact that American fiction is basically the most apolitical fiction on the globe. A South American writer wouldn't dare think of writing a novel if it didn't allude to the system into which these people are orchestrated - or an Eastern European writer, or a Russian writer, or a Chinese writer. Only American writers are able to imagine that the government and the corporations - all of it - seem to have no effect whatsoever.

  Michael Cunningham

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Michael Cunningham

  Book, Writing, Secret

  "Found in Translation". www.nytimes.com. October 2, 2010.

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