Arthur Miller Quotes (89 Quotes)

They're worried about the Harvard trademark, and they seem to be saying I'm diluting it by allowing some of my materials to be used at Concord Law School, Concord University. Curiously, they never said that when I was identified for 20-odd years on Good Morning America as Harvard Law School.

Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, What do you do And, being American, many's the time I've almost

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.

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

If you don't put something away in some type of investment plan that has restrictions, the money will probably disappear because if it's in our hot hands, it tends to get spent.

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

I dreamed I had a child, and even in the dream I saw it was my life, and it was an idiot, and I ran away. But it always crept on to my lap again, clutched at my clothes. Until I thought, if I could kiss it, whatever in it is my own, perhaps I could s

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

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.

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. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's gre.

Nobody dast blame this man. For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. 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 then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

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 bareass 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.

Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

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

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.

The word 'now' is like a bomb thrown through the window, and it ticks

Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

I understand Willy Loman's longing for immortality Willy's writing his name in a cake of ice on a hot day, but he wishes he were writing in stone.

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.

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.

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

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 dehumanisation of feelings, then the ultimate develop

I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.

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

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

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

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

Don't take it on yourself. Forget now. Live.

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

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

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.

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.

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