Steven Millhauser Quotes

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

I love J. G. Ballard. I love authors who take the world as we know it and just tweak one thing and say, 'What if the world were like this?'

I purposely adopted a style in my storytelling wherein I don't have to explain everything or why the story is moving in a particular way.

One of the problems in modern comics is that they keep referencing themselves endlessly.

My writing is not just all facts and voices. I strive to create a text that works as a sign, pointing out undercurrents that lie beneath the facts.

Everything in a novel has to be intentional, even the things that aren't.

It takes about seventy-five pages for a Parker reference - from 'The Score,' specifically - to show up in Geoff Manaugh's 'A Burglar's Guide to the City.'

In my mind, there's usually a fairly definitive kind of narrative when I write. But I don't want to enforce that on other people. I think that's why I like using metaphor so much.

Any book has behind it all the other books that have been written.

The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.

The only real reason for self-referencing is the fun factor. It's fun for the writer, getting little peeks at what old characters might be up to. And it's fun for readers to spot a familiar face, or pick up on a made-up book title or something from an earlier story. I don't know that it does -- or even should -- contribute to the story in hand being any better than it would have been without it.

I want the flashbacks to feel that once you're there they have their own unity, their own kind of atmospheric sensibility; I want the reader to be transported. The novel is a big, complicated, unknowable thing before it's written.

We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality . . . the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats.

There are writers who draw immediate attention to the fact that it's fiction. And I like some of that, but it doesn't really have the power.

I'm a pluralist about perspectives on literature. There seem to me to be all sorts of illuminating ways of responding to major literary works, some of them paying considerable attention to context, others applying various theoretical ideas, yet others focusing on details of language, or linking the work to the author's life, or connecting it with other works.

When I state myself, as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person.

The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

One way of ending the poem is to turn it back on itself, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth.

The echo mocks her origin to prove she is the original.

The book says [Lincoln in the Bardo],"I really need this sci-fi device of a ghost inhabiting another person." You say okay kind of begrudgingly. So the structure seemed informed by need and efficiency.

Sometimes I aid into the confusion by having my character's name be my name.

Books always speak of other books.

Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.

When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own life and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story.