SOURCE: "Steven Millhauser: The Business of Dreaming," in Publishers Weekly, May 6, 1996, pp. 56-7.

[In the following interview, Millhauser provides some insight on his perspectives regarding the creative process.]

Saratoga Springs, in upstate New York, is perhaps best known as the home of the oldest racetrack in America, where Texans in the obligatory ten-gallon hats and the more genteel traditional horsey set gather each August for the Travers Stakes. But Steven Millhauser's imagination is captured more by structures like the old Batchelor mansion, an elaborately painted and turreted Victorian folly a few blocks off the main drag. "The man who built that was not thinking just of a practical dwelling," Millhauser tells PW on a brilliant early spring day. "He was a dreamer."

In seven novels and short-story collections, Millhauser has made a considerable reputation writing about the inner lives of novelists, painters, puppeteers and other assorted inventors. His...