Steven Millhauser Quotes

God pity the poor novelist.

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

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

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

In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen.

I’m pleased by anything in myself that strikes me as not myself.

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

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.

We know nothing. Absolutely nothing.

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

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.

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