Arthur Miller Quotations

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

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.

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.

I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

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 structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.

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.

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.

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.

Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not.

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.

Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.

If I see an ending, I can work backward.

Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.

I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theatre, or the play - but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.

I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self.

Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?

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.

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 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.

You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.

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.

A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.

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.

Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that's what it's for!

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.

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.

All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.

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?

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.

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.

I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match.

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

Now we're eating pizza as opposed to steak.

Now we settle for half and I like it better.

I couldn't have predicted that a work like 'Death of a Salesman' would take on the proportions it has

There is an open terror of the critics (in New York) and of losing fortunes of money

Marrying him was my mistake, not his. He couldn't give me the attention, warmth and affection I need. It's not in his nature. Arthur never credited me with much intelligence. He couldn't share his intellectual life with me. As bed partners, we were so-so.

The Greeks used to use the same stories, the same mythology, time after time, different authors. There was no premium placed upon an original story, and indeed, Shakespeare likewise. A lot of people wrote plays about great kings. They didn't expect a brand-new story. It was what that new author made of the old story. It is probably the same now. We disguise it by inventing what seem to be new stories, but they're basically the same story anyway.

When the guns roar, the arts die.

I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.

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 Crucible became by far my most frequently produced play, both abroad and at home. Its meaning is somewhat different in different places and moments. I can almost tell what the political situation in a country is when the play is suddenly a hit there it is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past.

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.

I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it.

When today fails to offer the justification for hope, tomorrow becomes the only grail worth pursuing.

Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

The enemy is within, and within stays within, and we can't get out of within.

We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!

The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.

One had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives.

No one wants the truth if it is inconvenient.

My conception of the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind and in this respect at least the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them. If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.

Those who formally rule take their signals and commands not from the electorate as a body, but from a small group of men. This group will be called the Establishment. It exists even though that existence is stoutly denied. It is one of the secrets of the American social order... A second secret is the fact that the existence of the Establishment - the ruling class - is not supposed to be discussed.

One can’t stand forever on the shore. At some point, filled with indecision, skepticism, reservation and doubt, you either jump in or concede that life is forever elsewhere

In America, any man who is not a reactionary in his views is open to the charge of alliance with the Red hell.

I regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.

I don't say he's a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. 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. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.

If you analyse anything, you destroy it.

I believe in work. If somebody doesn't create something, however small it may be, he gets sick. An awful lot of people feel that they're treading water -- that if they vanished in smoke, it wouldn't mean anything at all in this world. And that's a despairing and destructive feeling. It'll kill you.

Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.

The writer must be in it; he can't be to one side of it, ever. He has to be endangered by it. His own attitudes have to be tested in it. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing himself, always.

God really does take our work seriously: It is wrong, it is a sin, to accept or remain in a position that you know is a mismatch for you. Perhaps that's a form of sin you've never considered - the sin of staying in the wrong job. But God did not place you on the earth to waste away your years in labor that does not employ his design or purpose for your life, no matter how much you may be getting paid for it.

The car, the furniture, the wife, the children - everything has to be disposable. Because you see the main thing today is - shopping.

Everything we are is at every moment alive in us.

Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!

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.

Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.

A playwright... is... the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about.

If a person measures his spiritual fulfillment in terms of cosmic visions, surpassing peace of mind, or ecstasy, then he is not likely to know much spiritual fulfillment. If, however, he measures it in terms of enjoying a sunrise, being warmed by a child's smile, or being able to help someone have a better day, then he is likely to know much spiritual fulfillment.

Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.

The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order - for meaning.

Just remember, kid, you can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that you gave away.

A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.

Down deep in His heart God is a comedian who loves to make us laugh.

How to live had started out as an analytical problem of how to place himself so as to intercept the flow of money in the society.

There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck in review after review, and in many conversations with writers and readers alike. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism.

Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain.

The brain heals the past like an injury ...

The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect.

But we are mostly what we are, and the turtle stretching toward delicious buds on high does not lighten his carapace by his resolve.

You specialize in something until one day it is specializing in you.

The famous are balloons far up in the sky, to be envied for their quiet freedom or shot down as enemies.

A little man makes a mistake and they hang him by the thumbs; the big ones become ambassadors.

... so many tremendous decisions in life are made because it is five o'clock.

Poor brain! How helplessly it dissolves when willing eyes meet and the nose warms to those old jungle scents.

Nevertheless, one learned very early that books had to be respected; they were all putative Bibles and to some small degree had a share in holiness.

I would be twenty before I learned how to be fifteen, thirty before I knew what it meant to be twenty, and now at seventy-two I have to stop myself from thinking like a man of fifty who has plenty of time ahead.

Few occasions are as joyous to small children as funerals, almost better than the big wedding blowouts that take place at night when it's hard to stay awake. A small boy will never be harshly criticized at a funeral; he is more treasured as death comes close and all his wickedness vanishes before the inescapable fact that thank God, he is healthy.

I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life.

An idol tells people exactly what to believe, God presents them with choices they have to make for themselves. The difference is far from insignificant; before the idol men remain dependent children, before God they are burdened and at the same time liberated to participate in the decisions of endless creation.

It was not really possible to understand oneself, let alone another human being.

It occurs to me that with all the television people watch, most of their acquaintances are actors.

Now hell and heaven grapple on our backs and all our old pretense is ripped away. Aye, and God's icy wind will blow.

When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die. ... No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion.

A genuine invention in the realm of ideas must first emerge as an abstruse and even partial concept? At first blusha new idea appearstobe verycloseto insanity because to be new it must reverse important basic beliefs and assumptions which, in turn, have been institutionalized and are administered by one or another kind of priesthood with a vested interest in an old idea.