Michael Cunningham Quotes

I read The Old Curiosity Shop before I began Blackwood Farm. I was amazed at the utter madness in that book.

As a shy kid growing up in Sheffield, I fantasized about how it would be great to be famous so I wouldn't actually have to talk to people and feel awkward. And of course, as we all know from fairy stories, when you achieve that ambition, you find out you don't want it.

I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.

I've just finished reading 'The Second Plane,' and I think it's some of the best non-fiction I've ever read.

That Happily Ever After is a great way to tell stories when you're young but eventually it loses its meaning because it's just not true.

They may turn out to be a great disappointment, or perhaps they may be full of enchanting surprises.

When I'm dead, I wanna leave a body of work, like authors or great painters do. I don't wanna get ideas above my station, but why shouldn't this be comparable? Pop music was supposed to be a flash in the pan, but here we are 50 years later, and it means something to us, and it always will do. It's incredibly important.

When I'm dead, I wanna leave a body of work, like authors or great painters do.

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

I've never managed to get very far with Henry James.

Modeling, for me, was not fulfilling. I didn't see the point - although I was able to travel a great deal. I lived in Italy, Germany, and Spain, but I wasn't devoted to it.

Rude contact with facts chased my visions and dreams quickly away, and in their stead I beheld the horrors, the corruption, the evils and hypocrisy of society, and as I stood among them, a young wife, a great wail of agony went out from my soul.

Readers want a good book; it's a writer's job to give it to them.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine... before she realizes she's reading.

Some books are like an hors d'oeuvre - light, tasty and leaving you longing for the main course which is never going to come - and some are like Christmas lunch immediately after a cooked breakfast.

When I read 'The Master', I felt that I had read a true classic. It's so rare nowadays that you have that feeling: it was a privilege to read it.

I read 'The First Bad Man' by Miranda July, and I just thought, 'Oh my God, I'll never be this good. That book is so incredible.'

Our entire film fraternity should be proud of 'Baahubali.' These are the kind of films that are not made very often.

I think Bellow's the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I'm in awe.

I would love to love Saul Bellow, but by page fifty of 'Herzog', something within me has wandered into another room.

I had read Harold Bloom's 'Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?' Late in his life, having read everything, Bloom asked which books had given him wisdom. I had just read a bunch of contemporary novels that had no wisdom for me.

I read the 'Nightflyers' novella and knowing that it was something that had been written by George R.R. Martin, knowing how those stories kind of go, I was really curious to see what happened to my character in the source material.

I never show my books to Ricky. His writing is very different, and anyway, he's only read one novel in his life: 'The Catcher in the Rye.'

I really enjoyed reading 'The Da Vinci Code,' but from a literary standpoint, the book did not live up to the hype.

One of the great pleasures of reading Tom Wolfe - of still reading Tom Wolfe - is the sense of awe he consistently inspires.