Words matter. These are the best Michael Cunningham Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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 seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years.
As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both ‘Moby Dick’ and ‘The Great Gatsby’ were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared.
I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.
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 have no useful theories about love and marriage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Before there was any talk of a movie, people would sometimes ask me what actors I would imagine playing these characters. And the only thing I could ever say is: I have such a clear idea of these characters that they’d have to play themselves.
