Quotes from Steven Millhauser

Members of this school insist that the only way to find an opening to our underground world is to seek out a quiet and secluded spot. Close your eyes. Concentrate your attention inward. Descend.

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

I never write to disappear and escape. The truth is exactly the opposite. Most people strike me as escaping and disappearing in one way or another - into their jobs, their daily routines, their delusions about themselves and others.

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

God pity the poor novelist.

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 were crammed sideways and right side up in a narrow bookcase that rose higher than my head and leaned dangerously from the wall, books sat in stacks on top of a dingy dresser. The closet door was propped open by a pile of books, and from beneath the bed a book stuck out beside the toe of a maroon slipper.

So imagine a fire going -- wood snapping the way it does when it's a little green — the wind rattling the windows behind the curtains -- and one of those Chopin melodies that feel like sorrow and ecstasy all mixed together pouring from the keys -- and you have my idea of happiness. Or just reading, reading and lamplight, the sound of pages turning. And so you dare to be happy. You do that thing. You dare.

I saw that I was in danger of becoming ordinary, and I understood that from now on I would have to be vigilant.

His ambition was to insert his dreams into the world, and if they were the wrong dreams, then he would dream them in solitude.

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 that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.

Un libro es una máquina para fabricar sueños. Está hecho para sacarte de este mundo.

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

For what is genius, I ask you, but the capacity to be obsessed? ...We have all been geniuses, you and I; but sooner or later it is beaten out of us, the glory faded, and by the age of seven most of us are nothing but wretched little adults.

Others saw in the trend still another instance of a disturbing tendency in the American suburb: the longing for withdrawal, for self-enclosure, for expensive isolation.

We others are not like you. We are more prickly, more jittery, more restless, more secretive, more desperate, more cowardly, more bold. We live at the edges of ourselves, not in the middle places. We leave that to you.

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 what you were seeing with your eyes.

I expected no miracles; I wasn't young enough for dreams; I knew in my bones that I couldn't escape my troubles by changing the view from my window.

Awkward approximations, dull stammerings which cannot convey my sense of exhilaration as I seem to burst impediments, to exceed bounds of the possible, to experience, in the ruins of the human, the birth of something utterly new.

A story with a single ending seems to us a bare and diminished thing, like a tree with a single branch; and each ending seems to us an expression of something that is buried deep within the tale and can be brought to light in that way and no other.

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

Perhaps sound is only an insanity of silence, a mad gibber of empty space grown fearful of listening to itself and hearing nothing.

Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.

Franklin knew that the truth lay with the winter night: the world was silent and black-and-white.

Then solar systems, galaxies, supernovas, infinite space itself will become elements of a final masterwork--a never-ending festival, a celestial amusement park in which every exploding star and spinning electron is part of the empyreal choreography.