Michael Cunningham Quotes

I'm always struck with writing - I constantly feel like I don't know what I'm doing and I'm starting over.

There's this thin line between knowing something is going to be really hard and saying, 'Yeah, you know, but I still gotta see if I can pull it off.'

I'd rather attempt something I'm not sure I can do.

If I'm doing something I know I can pull off, then that's not the book I should be writing.

I don't know if I want to be a writer.

I didn't think I could pull off a novel.

With each book, I'm trying to do something that terrifies me.

People ask me when I decided to become a playwright, and I tell them I decide to do it every day. Most days it's very hard because I'm frightened - not frightened of writing a bad play, although that happens often with me. I'm frightened of encountering the wilderness of my own spirit, which is always , no matter how many plays I write, a new and uncharted place. Every day when I sit down to write, I can't remember how it's done.

I'm terribly afraid of failure. When your identity is wrapped up in writing and you've written something that doesn't work, it's a tough pill to swallow.

I wonder if the greatest challenges was to keep pressing into [writing] when I had never been here before. I felt like Abraham - being called to something that he didn't know how to get to.

I think there's something strange about writing a script I've written many, many scripts - dozens and dozens of scripts - and every time I start one, I think to myself: 'why in the world do I think I know how to do this?'

I'm widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I'm not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.

What profession is more trying than that of author? After you finish a piece of work it only seems good to you for a few weeks; or if it seems good at all you are convinced that it is the last you will be able to write; and if it seems bad you wonder whether everything you have done isn’t poor stuff really; and it is one kind of agony while you are writing, and another kind when you aren’t.

Whenever you're making a movie, especially when you're writing, you always have self-doubts.

If I have accomplished anything good, then it's mainly because I've been driven by the need to know whether I can accomplish things I'm not sure I have the capacity for.

... what I fear in writing is the safe decision.

When you're writing is when the "god should I just drop this" feeling can hit. When you're editing is when the "god this is awful and I've wasted everyone's time and money and will be revealed as a fraud" feeling can hit.

I think that we, as writers, get excited by risk. When we are feeling comfortable and familiar, I wouldn't say that we get bored, but the energy in the room gets flat. When we're most excited and when the show is the most fun, it's when we're duking things out.

I feel like if it's not scaring you, you're doing it wrong.

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.

A good writer always works at the impossible.There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights.

I always feel I'm an amateur. I don't most of the time know what I'm doing.

I struggle with confidence, every time. I’m never completely sure I can write another book. Maybe my scope is too grand, my questions too hard, surely readers won’t want to follow me here. A novel is like a cathedral, it knocks you down to size when you enter into it.

Why do I find it hard to write the next line?