"God pity the poor novelist."
— Steven Millhauser (Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright)

"All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal."
— Steven Millhauser

"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

"I thought of myself, in those days, as someone in disguise—beneath the obedient son, beneath the straight-A student, the agreeable well-brought-up boy with his friends and his ping-pong and his semiofficial girlfriend, there was another being, restless, elusive, mocking, disruptive, imperious, and this shadowy underself had nothing to do with that other one who laughed with his friends and went to school dances and spent summer afternoons at the beach."
— Steven Millhauser (Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories)

"Ennui had more distractions far more amusing than the automatons of a watchmaker in Mühlenberg."
— 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 (Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories)

"I expected no miracles; I wasn't young enough for dreams; I knew in my bones that I couldn't escape my troubles by changing the view from my window."
— Steven Millhauser

"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