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.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the unique human ability to dream and imagine while awake, highlighting the transformative power of books and art.
In this quote, Steven Millhauser illustrates the fundamental distinction between humans and animals, centering it on our capacity for conscious dreaming and imagination. He argues that books serve not just as sources of knowledge, but as vehicles for creative thinking, allowing readers to visualize and connect deeply with the ideas presented, akin to controlled chaos or madness found in art, which alters our perception of reality.
In practice
In a book club discussion to highlight the importance of literature in understanding art.
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.
Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.
A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.
If you really want to be an artist, you search yourself, and you find a lot of it comes from earlier times. I have pretty much built the work around my experiences. When I've moved from one place to another, the work has changed.
Movie acting is primarily listening. If you're really engaged, that's all a movie audience wants to see is you processing what's happening in your world.
To be a great painter means to be a great poet: someone who transcends the limits of his language.
The great film editor is not a cutter, he's a storyteller, right?
The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within...could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the result; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline; and the most glorious poetry that has been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.