Arthur Miller Quotes

161 Sourced Quotes

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

Arthur Miller
Years ago a person, he was unhappy, didn't know what to do with himself—he'd go to church, start a revolution—something. Today you're unhappy? Can't figure it out? What is the salvation? Go shopping.

Arthur Miller
And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. 'Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?

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

Arthur Miller
Danforth: Do you mean to deny this confession when you are free?
Proctor: I mean to deny nothing!
Danforth: Then explain to me, Mr. Proctor, why you will not let —
Proctor: [With the cry of his whole soul] 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!

Arthur Miller
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.

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

Arthur Miller
I don't say he's a great man. Willy 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 into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.

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

Arthur Miller
A play's an interpretation. It is not a report. And that is the beginning of its poetry because, in order to interpret, you have to distort toward a symbolic construction of what happened, and as that distortion takes place, you begin to leave out and overemphasize and consequently deliver up life as a unity rather than as a chaos, and any such attempt, the more intense it is, the more poetic it becomes.

Arthur Miller
The shadow of a cornstalk on the ground is lovely, but it is no denial of its loveliness to see as one looks on it that it is telling the time of day, the position of the earth and the sun, the size of our planet and its shape, and perhaps even the length of its life and ours among the stars.

Arthur Miller
The success of a play, especially one's first success, is somewhat like pushing against a door which is suddenly opened that was always securely shut until then. For myself, the experience was invigorating. It suddenly seemed that the audience was a mass of blood relations, and I sensed a warmth in the world that had not been there before. It made it possible to dream of daring more and risking more.

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

Arthur Miller
The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out,

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

Arthur Miller
Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible. And it is curious, although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after century, are the tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the belief-optimistic, if you will, in the perfectibility of man.

Arthur Miller
The famous are balloons far up in the sky, to be envied for their quiet freedom or shot down as enemies.

Arthur Miller
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.

Arthur Miller
How to live had started out as an analytical problem of how to place himself so as to intercept the flow of money in the society.

Arthur Miller
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.

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
I would be twenty before I learned how to be fifteen, thirty before I knew what it meant to be twenty, and now at seventy-two I have to stop myself from thinking like a man of fifty who has plenty of time ahead.

Arthur Miller
It was not really possible to understand oneself, let alone another human being.

Arthur Miller
THE PRICE grew out of a need to reconfirm the power of the past, the seedbed of current reality, and the way to possibly reaffirm cause and effect in an insane world.

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
Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain.

Arthur Miller
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.

Arthur Miller
So many tremendous decisions in life are made because it is five o'clock.

Arthur Miller
When a deposit bottle is broken, you don't get your nickel back.

Arthur Miller
Down deep in His heart God is a comedian who loves to make us laugh.

Arthur Miller