Arthur Miller Quotes

161 Sourced Quotes

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

Arthur Miller
A person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is a sharp time, now, a precise time — we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.

Arthur Miller
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.

Arthur Miller
Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!

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

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

Arthur Miller
Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect.
No tragedy can therefore come about when its author fears to question absolutely everything, when he regards any institution, habit or custom as being either everlasting, immutable or inevitable. In the tragic view the need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star, and whatever it is that hedges his nature and lowers it is ripe for attack and examination.

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

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

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

Arthur Miller
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.

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

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

Arthur Miller
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.

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
You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away — a man is not a piece of fruit.

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

Arthur Miller
He have his goodness now, God forbid I take it from him!

Arthur Miller
What work you do! It's strange work for a Christian girl to hang old women!

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

Arthur Miller
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.

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

Arthur Miller
A fire, a fire is burning! I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! And it is my face, and yours, Danforth! For them that quail to bring men out of ignorance, as I have quailed, and as you quail now when you know in all your black hearts that this be fraud — God damns our kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together!

Arthur Miller
Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

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
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.

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
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 great.

Arthur Miller
I have not moved from there to here without I think to please you, and still an everlasting funeral marches round your heart.

Arthur Miller