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Michael Cunningham Quotes about Writing

All Michael Cunningham Quotes Children Giving Heart Language Morning Running Writing quotes Youth
One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

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 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

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

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

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

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.

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

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