Steven Millhauser

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

God pity the poor novelist.

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

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

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

After all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any whim or passion and follow it to the farthest reaches of our natures. We wanted to live – to die – to burst into flame – to be transformed into angels or explosions. Only the mundane offended us, as if we secretly feared it was our destiny . By late afternoon our muscles ached, our eyelids grew heavy with obscure desires. And so we dreamed and did nothing, for what was there to do, played ping-pong and went to the beach, loafed in backyards, slept late into the morning – and always we craved adventures so extreme we could never imagine them. In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen.