Quotes by Steven Millhauser

About Steven Millhauser:

Steven Millhauser is 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.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

After all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any whim or passion and follow it to the farthest reaches o...

Steven Millhauser

God pity the poor novelist.

Steven Millhauser

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

Steven Millhauser

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 he...

Steven Millhauser

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

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 th...

Steven Millhauser

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 ...

Steven Millhauser

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.

Steven Millhauser

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

Steven Millhauser

Martin thought of the iron El trestles winding and stretching across the city, of department store windows and hotel lobbies, of electric elevators and street-car ads, of the city pressing its way north on both sides of the great park, of dynamos and...

Steven Millhauser

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

Steven Millhauser

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

Steven Millhauser

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

Steven Millhauser

Author Bio

  • NameSteven Millhauser
  • DescriptionAmerican novelist and short story writer
  • BornAugust 3, 1943
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist