Michael Cunningham Quotes

My stories are never quite good enough.

When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars.

I find writing extremely difficult. I usually have to drag myself to my desk, mainly because I doubt myself. And it's getting harder because I want to improve with every book.

Now you mustn't think that I don't have any ideas for novels in my head. I've got ideas for ten novels in my head. But with every idea I have, I already foresee the wrong novels I would write, because I also have critical ideas in my head; I've got a full theory of the perfect novel, and that's what stumps me.

I do want to say the process of writing a novel is riddled with self-doubt and self-loathing.

Catch me on a good day, I think half of my books aren't too bad. Catch me on a bad day, I think I've never written a good line.

In the back of my mind was the constant hankering, almost yearning, to write but something always stopped me in my tracks. Or if I did find my way to put a pen to paper or finger on a keyboard I'd give up after a few minutes. I'd find other things to do: Anything but writing.

Getting to the point where I was ready to write a book has been about a 20-year journey of being, really honestly, too afraid to try - which I think is pretty common for people who are trying to write a large piece of fiction.

I've tried writing. Two days later I'd go visit it and say, Jesus Christ, who wrote this crap?

No matter how many awards you've won or how many sales you've got, come the next book it's still a blank sheet of paper and you're still panicking like hell that you've got nothing new to say.

I once read Updike after writing a first draft, and I wanted to put my own book on the fire. I've since learned to read utter crap while I'm writing: pulp is the thing.

After 'A Suitable Boy,' I didn't write anything, not even a short story. I thought to myself: 'I ought to start writing.' But I can never force myself to write.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

I, for one, find writing excruciating. Some mornings, as I'm on my way to my desk, my hands actually tremble with fear. The fear, of course, is that I'll sit down at the desk and discover that what I've written is claptrap. Fear inevitably leads to procrastination.

My verses stand gawping a bit. I never get used to this. They've lived here long enough.

When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright. But everything I wrote, I thought, was weak. And I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have.

Before I sat down and became a writer, before I began to do it habitually and for my living, there was a decades-long stretch when I was terrified that it would suck, so I didn't write. I think that marks a lot of people, a real terror at being bad at something, and unfortunately, you are always bad before you can get a little better.

I'm never going to write a book like Anthony Sher did, you know, 'The Broadcaster Prepares.' I'm only talking to myself. I'd have liked to be a writer, or a journalist, but if things don't come easy to me I don't do them. I think if you're always thinking how difficult something is, you shouldn't be doing it.

I like writing a lot more than I used to. I used to find it scary but now I've got used to it once it gets going. I used to find it hard to start. Fear of the blank page. The first thing you write down won't bear any relation to what's in your head and that's always disappointing.

Every word I write I suspect the next day.

You always feel like a hack and a fraud when you're writing. It's just how it goes.

For years, when I was popular, I would face the blank page to write, and I couldn't think of anything that I thought was good enough.

To write fiction is to think that you're doing it wrong - that your work habits are inhibiting you; that you've chosen the wrong subject; that you've chosen the right subject, but that someone else has, unbeknownst to you, already written exactly the book you're laboring over.