Arthur Miller quotes:

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  • 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 have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.

  • Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

  • Whoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story. People elsewhere tend to accept, to a far greater degree anyway, that the conditions of life are hostile to mans pretensions.

  • Without alienation, there can be no politics.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • Jerusalem is ... the fabled city which for the Western mind is as much dream as stone ... a compressed symbol of our most sublime aspirations along with our most disgusting, hatefully brainless excursions into religious bigotry and fratricide.

  • Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

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

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

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

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

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

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

  • Will you let me go for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?

  • The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.

  • 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.

  • If I see an ending, I can work backward.

  • 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 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.

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

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

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • The only thing you've got in this world is what you can sell.

  • If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

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

  • I am a good woman. I know it.

  • I'm sure there are writers who are great businessmen, but I never met any.

  • 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.

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

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

  • A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

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

  • 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.

  • 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!

  • A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence.

  • I figure I've done what I could do, more or less, and now I'm going back to being a chemical; all we are is a lot of talking nitrogen, you know...

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • Without alienation, there can be no politics

  • 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

  • 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 train resembles the Soviet type and is quite comfortable, but all socialist structures I have ever encountered have toilets stemming from a single model engineered by the Orthodox Church in Tsarist Russia to ensure that man never be allowed to forget the corruption of the flesh.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Mother: What more can we be?Chris: You can be better! Once and for all you can know there's a universe of people outside and you're responsible to it, and unless you know that you threw away your son because that's how he died.

  • Chris: I don't know why it is, but every time I reach out for something I want, I have to pull back because other people will suffer.

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

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

  • The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • A man is not a bird, to come and go with the springtime.

  • Willy Loman: I don't want change, I want Swiss cheese!

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

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Witch-hunts are always spooked by women's horrifying sexuality awakened by the superstud Devil.

  • 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.

  • 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 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.

  • 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.

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

  • All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.

  • 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.

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

  • You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return.

  • ... vulgarity has no nation.

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

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • Cleave to no faith when faith brings blood.

  • No one wants the truth if it is inconvenient.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • Everything we are is at every moment alive in us.

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

  • If you analyse anything, you destroy it.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

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

  • 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.

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

  • The world is always ending; the exact date depends on when you came into it.

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