Top 228 Quotes & Sayings by Arthur Miller
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American playwright Arthur Miller.
Last updated on October 10, 2024.
I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.
I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play-but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.
The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.
I am older than everyone I ever knew. All my dogs are dead. Half a dozen cats, parakeets... all gone.
The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.
The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.
Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.
I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.
A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.
Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.
All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.
If I have any justification for having lived it's simply, I'm nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There's some value in that.
Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.
Can anyone remember love? It's like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume.
He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.
A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.
I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I'd find you coming through some door.
The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.
Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not.
The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality.
A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that's what it's for!
Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.
Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.
Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?
I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.
You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return.
I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self.
I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match.
The job is to ask questions-it always was-and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.
You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.
A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.
If I see an ending, I can work backward.
Without alienation, there can be no politics.
Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.
What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.
It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not?
Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.
He wants to live on through something-and in his case, his masterpiece is his son. all of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world.
Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.
I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.
A little man makes a mistake and they hang him by the thumbs; the big ones become ambassadors.
Everything we are is at every moment alive in us.
My plays are always involved with society, but I'm writing about people, too, and it's clear over the years that audiences understand them and care about them. The political landscape changes, the issues change, but the people are still there. People don't really change that much.
Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.
Work a lifetime to pay off a house You finally own it and there's nobody to live in it.
And yet one can't forever stand on the shore; at some point, even if filled with indecision, skepticism, reservation and doubt, you either jump in or concede that life is forever elsewhere.
...When the government goes into the business of destroying trust, it goes into the business of destroying itself.
I’m a writer, and everything I write is both a confession and a struggle to understand things about myself and this world in which I live. This is what everyone’s work should be-whether you dance or paint or sing. It is a confession, a baring of your soul, your faults, those things you simply cannot or will not understand or accept. You stumble forward, confused, and you share. If you’re lucky, you learn something.
The job is to ask questions - it always was - and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.
The brain heals the past like an injury.
The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.
A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse.
Life is an endless, truly endless struggle. There's no time when we're going to arrive at a plateau where the whole thing gets sorted. It's a struggle in the way every plant has to find it's own way to stand up straight. A lot of the time it's a failure. And yet it's not a failure if some enlightenment comes from it.
An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.
The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.
No one wants the truth if it is inconvenient.
If you analyse anything, you destroy it.
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