Arthur Miller Quotes

161 Sourced Quotes

We're free and clear, Willy. We're free, we're free, we're free...

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
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.

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

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

Arthur Miller
In this age few tragedies are written. It has often been held that the lack is due to a paucity of heroes among us, or else that modern man has had the blood drawn out of his organs of belief by the skepticism of science, and the heroic attack on life cannot feed on an attitude of reserve and circumspection. For one reason or another, we are often held to be below tragedy — or tragedy above us.

Arthur Miller
Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God's fingers? I'll tell you what's walking Salem — vengeance is walking Salem. 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! This warrant's vengeance! I'll not give my wife to vengeance!

Arthur Miller
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.

Arthur Miller
John, I counted myself so plain, so poorly made, no honest love could come to me! Suspicion kissed you when I did; I never knew how I should say my love. It were a cold house I kept!

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

Arthur Miller
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.

Arthur Miller
It is mistaken law that leads you to sacrifice. Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it. I beg you, woman, prevail upon your husband to confess. Let him give his lie. Quail not before God's judgment in this, for it may well be God damns a liar less than he that throws his life away for pride.

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

Arthur Miller
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.

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

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

Arthur Miller
I'll plead no more! I see now your spirit twists around the single error of my life, and I will never tear it free!

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

Arthur Miller
Charley: He won't starve. None a them starve. Forget about him. Willy: Then what have I got to remember?

Arthur Miller
I'm very well liked in Hartford. You know, the trouble is, Linda, people don't seem to take to me.

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

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
Theology, sir, is a fortress; no crack in a fortress may be accounted small.

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

Arthur Miller
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.

Arthur Miller
It is always and forever the same struggle: to perceive somehow our own complicity with evil is a horror not to be borne. … much more reassuring to see the world in terms of totally innocent victims and totally evil instigators of the monstrous violence we see all about us. At all costs, never disturb our innocence. But 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 perfection of innocence, indeed, is madness.

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
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.

Arthur Miller
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.

Arthur Miller
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.

Arthur Miller