Arthur Miller Quotes

161 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Arthur Miller
Ben, that funeral will be massive! They'll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire! All the old-timers with the strange license plates — that boy will be thunderstruck, Ben, because he never realized — I am known! Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey — I am known, Ben, and he'll see it with his eyes once and for all.

Arthur Miller
If you love your country why is it necessary to hate other countries?

Arthur Miller
They don't need me in New York. I'm the New England man. I'm vital in New England.

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

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

Arthur Miller
The world is an oyster, but you don't crack it open on a mattress.

Arthur Miller
Part of knowing who we are is knowing we are not someone else. And Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, the agony we cannot feel, the death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other.

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

Arthur Miller
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.

Arthur Miller
There is a kind of perverse unity forming among us, born, I think, of the discontent of all classes of people with the endless frustration of life.

Arthur Miller
I simply asked him if he was making any money. Is that a criticism?

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

Arthur Miller
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 asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day.

Arthur Miller
I have trouble enough without I come five mile to hear him preach only hellfire and bloody damnation. Take it to heart, Mr. Parris. There are many others who stay away from church these days because you hardly ever mention God any more.

Arthur Miller
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. 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. It isn't easy to do in the theater, but it's twice as hard in film.

Arthur Miller
Work a lifetime to pay off a house — You finally own it and there's nobody to live in it.

Arthur Miller
Nobody dast blame this man. Willy was a salesman. And 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.

Arthur Miller
Hale: Here is all the invisible world, caught, defined, and calculated. In these books the Devil stands stripped of all his brute disguises. Here are all your familiar spirits — your incubi and succubi; your witches that go by land, by air, and by sea; your wizards of the night and of the day. Have no fear now — we shall find him out if he has come among us, and I mean to crush him utterly if he has shown his face!
Rebecca: Will it hurt the child, sir?
Hale: I cannot tell. If she is truly in the Devil's grip we may have to rip and tear to get her free.

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

Arthur Miller
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.

Arthur Miller
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.

Arthur Miller
I am inclined to notice the ruin in things, perhaps because I was born in Italy.

Arthur Miller
Hale: There is a prodigious fear of this court in the country —
Danforth: Then there is a prodigious guilt in the country. Are you afraid to be questioned here?
Hale: I may only fear the Lord, sir, but there is fear in the country nevertheless.
Danforth: Reproach me not with the fear in the country; there is fear in the country because there is a moving plot to topple Christ in the country!
Hale: But it does not follow that everyone accused is part of it.
Danforth: No uncorrupted man may fear this court, Mr. Hale!

Arthur Miller