Steven Millhauser

“All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.”

“God pity the poor novelist.”

“That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise...”

“As I train myself to cast off words, as I learn to erase word-thoughts, I begin to feel a new world rising up around me, The old world of houses, rooms, trees and streets shimmers, wavers an...”

“I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.”

“Ennui had more distractions far more amusing than the automatons of a watchmaker in Mühlenberg.”

“But what struck me was the book-madness of the place--books lay scattered across the unmade bed and the top of a battered-looking desk, books stood in knee-high piles on the floor, books wer...”

“Art, he said, was a controlled madness...He said that books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced wh...”

“Repetition for no reason is a sign of carelessness or pretentiousness, but there are plenty of good reasons to repeat words and phrases.”

“If you read a story with an 'I' or a 'he' or a 'she,' you're in familiar territory - but 'we' is mostly unexplored. I think of 'we' as an adventure.”

“If you fear phantoms, you're like a child frightened of seeing things in the dark.”