Steven Millhauser Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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