Steven Millhauser Quotes

I think both you and I, we live in a world of fiction and stories.

The moment there is imagination there is myth

Fictions are merely frozen dreams, linked images with some semblance of structure. They are not to be trusted, no more than the people who create them.

But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.

If you're making it up, make it up good. And then believe in what you made up.

I don't think I wrote stories down when I was young, but I certainly made them up, perhaps sometimes losing track of the border between reality and make-believe.

I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

A work of fiction is conceived very much the same way as a dream occurs in the mind of a sleeper. But a lot of it is imagination. It's not based on real people.

From a very young age, stories fuelled my imagination in the most wonderful way.

I'm really into the idea of telling stories. Everyone needs stories. Everyone needs to escape every once in a while.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

I make it all up, and all of it is true.

There are so many stories to be told, by so many good writers.

My life isn't very racy or exciting so I make things up, tell stories. I like telling stories.

I take inspiration from my life but only twenty per cent is real the rest is all made up.

A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts.

You can start making up any kind of story if you want to.

Books are packaged dreams.

Everything you look at can become a fairy tale and you can get a story from everything you touch.

Fiction just makes it all more interesting. Truth is so boring.

It's not magic that takes us to another world - it's storytelling.

All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.

If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.

IMAGINATION, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.