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.

When the guns roar, the arts die.

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.

As a writer, I've always believed that while my work and I myself are embedded in whatever period I am writing about, clearly I am sensitive to the winds that are blowing in the culture. At the same time, I have always felt that the issue was not to deal with the problem in the abstract, but to deal with the people who are in that problem. The emphasis is on the people. The general problem begins to resolve itself even before the play is finished.

In a dream, we are simply confronted with various loaded symbols, and where one is exhausted, it gives way to another.

Theater is a very changeable art. It responds to the moment in history the way the newspaper does, and there's no predicting what to come up with next.

The two greatest plays ever written were Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, and they're both about father-son relationships.

There is a problem on the so-called commercial stage in New York. The price of a ticket is exorbitant, and there are no longer original productions possible, apparently, on the commercial stage. They are all plays that were taken from either England or smaller theaters, off-Broadway theaters, and so on. The one justification there used to be for the commercial theater was that it originated everything we had, and now it originates nothing. But the powers that be seem perfectly content to have it that way. They don't risk anything anymore, and they simply pick off the cream.

A friend of mine once said that there were only two truly national events in the history of the United States. One was the Civil War and the other one was the Depression.

Playwriting is an oral art; it's not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard.

I came out of a culture in which my uncle, my father - they were all salesmen of one kind or another. My father was a manufacturer. He also, in effect, had to sell that stuff. And if he didn't literally do it, his men did. So, selling was in the air through my boyhood. The whole idea of successfully selling was very important.

The culture of the United States has flooded the world. It's the inevitable result of a powerful culture, art. We've got an instinctive touch when it comes to the popular mind because we've had no aristocracy. It is a democratic country. And we know without knowing it, without bothering to understand it, how to reach ordinary people, sometimes with the most vulgar, worthless junk on the face of the earth, but we know how to do it [laughter].

Americans don't speak foreign languages, by and large. Their interest in anything beyond the borders of the country is limited. A European of any cultivation has to speak a couple of languages; he inevitably without being very thoughtful about it gets to understand what other people think about him.

People do look to others for some leadership, and it's not bad for them to supply it when they feel that way.

The word "now" is like a bomb through the window, and it ticks.

And old Dave, he'd go up to his room, y'understand, put on his green velvet slippers - I'll never forget - and pick up his phone and call the buyers, and without leaving his room, at the age of eighty-four, he made his living. And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want.

Studies show that a trusting workplace increases employees' level of happiness, work effort, productivity, and engagement. It also provides an environment that encourages open communication and promotes people to share their ideas.

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.

A suicide kills two people . . . that's what it's for.

I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.

Great stones they lay upon his chest until he plead aye or nay. They say he give them but two words. "More weight," he says. And died.

It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves

That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?

...an everlasting funeral marches round your heart.

There is unquestionably a contradiction between an efficient technological machine and the flowering of human nature, of the human personality.

He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him!

Controlled hysteria is what's required. To exist constantly in a state of controlled hysteria. It's agony. But everyone has agony. The difference is that I try to take my agony home and teach it to sing.

...When the government goes into the business of destroying trust, it goes into the business of destroying itself.

Flight Reservation Systems decide whether or not you exist. If your information isn't in their database, then you simply don't get to go anywhere.

It may be that even if half consciously, we choose our personalities to maintain a certain saving balance in the family's little universe.

... if you love your country why is it necessary to hate other countries?

When any creativity becomes useful, it is sucked into the vortex of commercialism, and when a thing becomes commercial, it becomes the enemy of man.

Cleave to no faith when faith brings blood.

Suicide kills two people.

In his play depicting the Salem Witch Trials, the author illustrates profound psychological bullying. The ringleader of young girls suspected of unsavory conduct, frightens her friends into silence by warning: Now, look you; All of you. We danced. And Tituba conjured Ruth Putnam's dead sisters, and that was all. ... Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night, and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you.

I am bewildered by the death of love. And my responsibility for it.

He's liked, but he's not well liked.

For the political world, I have come to believe, is fundamentally beyond anyone's control, yet we all go on as though it were a kind of vehicle that only needs a change of drivers in order to steer it away from its frequent hair-raising visits to the edge of the cliff.

Willie was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to life?. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back - that's an earthquake.

I think the tragic feeling is invoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing -- his sense of personal dignity.

Be liked and you will never want.

Every time I am reading actors I can pretty well tell which ones have studied with Meisner. It is because they are honest and simple and don't lay on complications that aren't necessary.

By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.

The parochial snobbery of these people was partly responsible for their failure to convert the Indians. Probably they also preferred to take land from heathens rather than from fellow Christians. At any rate, very few Indians were converted, and the Salem folk believed that the virgin forest was the Devil's last preserve, his home base and the citadel of his final stand. To the best of their knowledge the American forest was the last place on earth that was not paying homage to God.

Data is a lot like humans: It is born. Matures. Gets married to other data, divorced. Gets old. One thing that it doesn't do is die. It has to be killed.

A doctor could make a million dollars if he could figure out a way to bring a boy into the world without a trigger finger.

The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.

The witch-hunt was a perverse manifestation of the panic which set in among all classes when the balance began to turn toward greater individual freedom. The witch-hunt was not, however, a mere repression. It was also, and as importantly, a long overdue opportunity for everyone so inclined to express publicly his guilt and sins, under the cover of accusations against the victims.

Without alienation, there can be no politics.

A lot of my work goes to the center of where we belong--if there is any root to life -because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don't live in the same place for very long.

The play is really a kind of nightmare. It ought to flow rapidly and effortlessly from one moment to another. In London, we had difficulty with the set, which required too much effort to move around. Having gotten the benefit of seeing it done once, I wanted to work on the script, to make it sharper and more pointed.

Today, [theatre's] more likely to be consciously not aimed at the public, but at a more sophisticated or educated public. . . . The result is that some of the sheer humanity has leaked out of the enterprise.

. . . usually, the biggest problems of adapting plays into screenplays is that they stick too close to the play, and I think film is a completely different medium. I think a novel is much closer to a film . . ..

THE PRICE grew out of a need to reconfirm the power of the past, the seedbed of current reality, and the way to possibly reaffirm cause and effect in an insane world.

Amos Oz is one of the finest novelists of this entire period. MY MICHAEL is a beautiful work of great depth and in some indescribable way lingers in the mind as a lyric song to his country's people as much as a moving love story.

Look, we're all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house - in the bedroom he's asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room he's rolling around with some bare ass girl, in the library he's paying his taxes, in the yard he's raising tomatoes and in the cellar he's making a bomb to blow it all up.

The best of our theater is standing on tiptoe, striving to see over the shoulders of father and mother. The worst is exploiting and wallowing in the self-pity of adolescence and obsessive keyhole sexuality. The way out, as the poet says, is always through.

They know your name, address, telephone number, credit card numbers, who ELSE is driving the car "for insurance", ... your driver's license number. In the state of Massachusetts, this is the same number as that used for Social Security, unless you object to such use. In THAT case, you are ASSIGNED a number and you reside forever more on the list of "weird people who don't give out their Social Security Number in Massachusetts."

Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible. And it is curious, although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after century, are the tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the belief-optimistic, if you will, in the perfectibility of man.

The mission of the theatre, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.

A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.

After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.

Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you. And you know I can do it; I saw Indians smash my dear parents' heads on the pillow next to mine, and I have seen some reddish work done at night, and I can make you wish you had never seen the sun go down! - Abigail

The jungle is dark but full of diamonds, Willy.