Quotes by : Steven Millhauser

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

He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted....

I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving....

Art, he said, was a controlled madness...He said that books weren't made of themes, which you could write....

Was there a turn, a change in the atmosphere? To single out a particular moment is to distort the record,....

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

After all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world....

As I train myself to cast off words, as I learn to erase word-thoughts, I begin to feel a new world rising....

The swirling lines of snow were composed of separate flakes, and each flake was a cluster of separate....

That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings....