Steven Millhauser
Steven Millhauser
Steven Millhauseris an American novelist and short story writer. He won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel Martin Dressler. The prize brought many of his older books back into print...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 August 1943
CountryUnited States of America
novelists pity poor
God pity the poor novelist.
mask
All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.
dream stories conjuring
Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.
dream art book
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.
summer cutting long
In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen.
wall book doors
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.
dream ambition solitude
His ambition was to insert his dreams into the world, and if they were the wrong dreams, then he would dream them in solitude.
strikes
I’m pleased by anything in myself that strikes me as not myself.
absolutely-nothing knows
We know nothing. Absolutely nothing.
morning dirty flower
And again it snowed, and again the sun came out. In the mornings on the way to the station Franklin counted the new snowmen that had sprung up mysteriously overnight or the old ones that had been stricken with disease and lay cracked apart-a head here, a broken body and three lumps of coal there-and one day he looked up from a piece of snow-colored rice paper and knew he was done. It was as simple as that: you bent over your work night after night, and one day you were done. Snow still lay in dirty streaks on the ground but clusters of yellow-green flowers hung from the sugar maples.
time
I don't take off time from teaching to write. I take time off from writing to teach.
good plenty reasons repeat repetition sign
Repetition for no reason is a sign of carelessness or pretentiousness, but there are plenty of good reasons to repeat words and phrases.
began comfort good hear matters music rhythms room small study
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.
delusions disappear escaping exactly people strike themselves truth
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.