Top 35 Steven Millhauser Quotes
#1. If you fear phantoms, you're like a child frightened of seeing things in the dark.
Steven Millhauser
#2. I think of childhood as an explosion of creativity. For most people, growing up and earning a living means leaving all that behind. But an artist never leaves that behind. Edwin Mullhouse was my way of exploring the child as artist and, under the guise of childhood, something larger.
Steven Millhauser
#3. I am often tired. I am sometimes discouraged. I am always sure.
Steven Millhauser
#4. This is the night of revelation. This is the night the dolls wake. This is the night of the dreamer in the attic. This is the night of the piper in the woods.
Steven Millhauser
#5. The more the mouse pursues this line of of thought, the more it seems to him that the cat is a large, soft mouse.
Steven Millhauser
#6. Do you believe that the actor on the stage is really a villain? Let me ask you something else. If he isn't a villain, then is he a liar?
Steven Millhauser
#7. 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.
Steven Millhauser
#8. I longed for release from whatever it was I was. But whatever I was lay hard and immovable in me, like bone; I would never be free of my own weight.
Steven Millhauser
#9. Was there a turn, a change in the atmosphere? To single out a particular moment is to distort the record, for it suggests a clear history of cause and effect that can only betray our sense of what really happened.
Steven Millhauser
#11. Writing is a way of getting at the things most people would prefer to escape. Writing takes me to the center of life. That's my invitation to my readers as well.
Steven Millhauser
#12. 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.
Steven Millhauser
#13. Repetition for no reason is a sign of carelessness or pretentiousness, but there are plenty of good reasons to repeat words and phrases.
Steven Millhauser
#14. 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.
Steven Millhauser
#15. 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.
Steven Millhauser
#16. I saw that I was in danger of becoming ordinary, and I understood that from now on I would have to be vigilant.
Steven Millhauser
#17. I'm pleased by anything in myself that strikes me as not myself.
Steven Millhauser
#18. I don't take off time from teaching to write. I take time off from writing to teach.
Steven Millhauser
#19. Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.
Steven Millhauser
#20. 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.
Steven Millhauser
#21. His ambition was to insert his dreams into the world, and if they were the wrong dreams, then he would dream them in solitude.
Steven Millhauser
#23. One thing I learned is that the park by the river in a recent story, 'Getting Closer,' is the same park by the river that appears for a moment near the end of 'The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad,' a story first published 23 years earlier. This echo at first irritated me, then pleased me deeply.
Steven Millhauser
#24. Franklin knew that the truth lay with the winter night: the world was silent and black-and-white.
Steven Millhauser
#25. All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.
Steven Millhauser
#26. 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.
Steven Millhauser
#27. 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.
Steven Millhauser
#28. What I dislike is conventional realism - a system of gestures, descriptions, psychological revelations that was once a vital way of representing the world but has become hackneyed through endless repetition. I'd argue that a conventional realist isn't a realist at all, but a falsifier of the real.
Steven Millhauser
#29. 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.
Steven Millhauser
#30. Perhaps sound is only an insanity of silence, a mad gibber of empty space grown fearful of listening to itself and hearing nothing.
Steven Millhauser
#31. We are happy to be here, where the sky has always seemed a little bluer, the leaves a little greener, than in other towns we know.
Steven Millhauser
#32. Now and again we would happen to step out of the familiar universe into a sudden sharp shock of sweetly scented air, sudden as spilled perfume, piercing as crystal, dark and sweet as the sound of oboes.
Steven Millhauser
#33. 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.
Steven Millhauser
#34. I began by working in a study in an attic, but for many years, I've used a small room in a library. What matters to me isn't decor or comfort but only quiet. I need to hear the rhythms of phrases, the music of sentences. Any place that allows me to do that is good enough.
Steven Millhauser
#35. I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.
Steven Millhauser
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