What I dislike is conventional realism - a system of gestures, descriptions, psychological revelations that was once a vital way of representing the world but has become hackneyed through endless repetition. I'd argue that a conventional realist isn't a realist at all, but a falsifier of the real.

Steven Millhauser

Categorized in : World Way Real Repetition

God pity the poor novelist.

Steven Millhauser

pity novelists poor

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.

Steven Millhauser

flower morning dirty

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

Steven Millhauser

conjuring stories dream

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

Steven Millhauser

precision leaving world

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

Steven Millhauser

mask

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.

Steven Millhauser

dream book art

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

Steven Millhauser

cutting summer long

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

Steven Millhauser

strikes

I saw that I was in danger of becoming ordinary, and I understood that from now on I would have to be vigilant.

Steven Millhauser

saws becoming ordinary

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

Steven Millhauser

mad space silence

So imagine a fire going -- wood snapping the way it does when it’s a little green — the wind rattling the windows behind the curtains -- and one of those Chopin melodies that feel like sorrow and ecstasy all mixed together pouring from the keys -- and you have my idea of happiness. Or just reading, reading and lamplight, the sound of pages turning. And so you dare to be happy. You do that thing. You dare.

Steven Millhauser

keys reading fire

His ambition was to insert his dreams into the world, and if they were the wrong dreams, then he would dream them in solitude.

Steven Millhauser

solitude ambition dream

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.

Steven Millhauser

wall doors book

We know nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Steven Millhauser

absolutely-nothing knows

If you read a story with an 'I' or a 'he' or a 'she,' you're in familiar territory - but 'we' is mostly unexplored. I think of 'we' as an adventure.

Steven Millhauser

story think you adventure

Writing is a way of getting at the things most people would prefer to escape. Writing takes me to the center of life. That's my invitation to my readers as well.

Steven Millhauser

me life people way

Repetition for no reason is a sign of carelessness or pretentiousness, but there are plenty of good reasons to repeat words and phrases.

Steven Millhauser

words good repetition reason

One thing I learned is that the park by the river in a recent story, 'Getting Closer,' is the same park by the river that appears for a moment near the end of 'The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad,' a story first published 23 years earlier. This echo at first irritated me, then pleased me deeply.

Steven Millhauser

river end me moment

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.

Steven Millhauser

daily me truth people

I think of childhood as an explosion of creativity. For most people, growing up and earning a living means leaving all that behind. But an artist never leaves that behind. Edwin Mullhouse was my way of exploring the child as artist and, under the guise of childhood, something larger.

Steven Millhauser

child childhood creativity people