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Arthur Miller

108 quotes

• “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 (1915–2005) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: After being refused a passport for his supposed disloyalty. The New York Herald Tribune (March 31, 1954)

• “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 (1915–2005) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The New York Herald Tribune (March 31, 1954)

• “The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Harper's (August 1958)

• “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 (1915–2005) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Collected Plays (1958) Introduction, Section 1

• “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 (1915–2005) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Collected Plays (1958) Introduction, Section 2

• “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 (1915–2005) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Collected Plays (1958) Introduction, Section 7

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

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The State of the Theatre" an interview by Henry Brandon in Harpers 221 (November 1960)

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

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in The Observer [London] (November 26, 1961)

• “The best of our theater is standing on tiptoe, striving to see over the shoulders of father and mother. The worst is exploiting and wallowing in the self-pity of adolescence and obsessive keyhole sexuality. The way out, as the poet says, is always through.”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: National Observer (January 20, 1964)

• “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 (1915–2005) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: National Observer (January 20, 1964)

• “The job is to ask questions — it always was — and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: National Observer (January 20, 1964)

• “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 (1915–2005) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: With respect for Her Agony — but with Love" in LIFE magazine (February 7, 1964)

• “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 (1915–2005) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Commenting on After the Fall (1964) in The Saturday Evening Post (February 1, 1964)

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

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Life (February 7, 1964)

• “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 (1915–2005) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Paris Review (Summer 1966)

• “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 (1915–2005) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Paris Review (Summer 1966)

• “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 dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Paris Review (Summer 1966)

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

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Price (1967)

• “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 (1915–2005) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: It Could Happen Here - And Did," The New York Times (April 30, 1967); also in The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (1996)

• “The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in Federalism and the French Canadians (1968) by Pierre Trudeau, p. 175

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

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Year it Came Apart", New York magazine, Vol. 8, No. 1 (December 30, 1974 – January 6, 1975), p. 30

• “I understand his 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.”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: On Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, as quoted in The New York Times (May 9, 1984)

• “He wants to live on through something — and in his case, his masterpiece is his son… all of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world.”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: On Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, as quoted in The New York Times (May 9, 1984)

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

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The New York Times (May 9, 1984)

• “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 (1915–2005) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The New York Times (May 9, 1984)

• “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 (1915–2005) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: On filming a television production of Death of a Salesman, as quoted in The New York Times (September 15, 1985)

• “If I see an ending, I can work backward.”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The New York Times (February 9, 1986)

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

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The New York Times (February 9, 1986)

• “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 (1915–2005) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The New York Times (February 9, 1986)

• “I figure I've done what I could do, more or less, and now I'm going back to being a chemical; all we are is a lot of talking nitrogen, you know...”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Leo in I Can't Remember Anything in Danger: Memory! : Two Plays (1987)

• “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 (1915–2005) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Timebends : A Life (1987)

• “I was very moved by that play once again when the Royal Shakespeare Company did a production that toured the cathedrals of England. Then they took it to Poland and performed it in the cathedrals there, too. The actors said it changed their lives. Officials wept; they were speechless after the play, and everyone knew why. It was because they had to enforce the kind of repression the play was attacking. That made me prouder than anything I ever did in my life. The mission of the theater, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Remarks on The Crucible in a 1987 interview; as quoted in "Arthur Miller, Moral Voice of American Stage, Dies at 89" by Marilyn Berger in The New York Times (February 11, 2005)

• “If I have any justification for having lived it's simply, I'm nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There's some value in that.”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Interview in Marxism Today (January 1988)

• “Without alienation, there can be no politics.”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Interview in Marxism Today (January 1988)

• “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 (1915–2005) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Times (January 11, 1989)

• “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 (1915–2005) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: His reply to a shoe manufacturer who had asked why Miller's job should be subsidized when his was not, as recounted at a London press conference. The Guardian (January 25, 1990)

• “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 (1915–2005) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Why I Wrote 'The Crucible in The New Yorker (October 21, 1996)

• “I see your point, but can you name one classical Greek or Elizabethean shoemaker?”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: His reply to a shoe manufacturer who had asked why theaters should be subsidized when his business was not, in The Collected Essays of Arthur Miller, 2000, Author's Foreword to the Second Edition

• “I'm a fatalist. … I consider I am rejected in principle. My work is and, through my work, I am. If it's accepted, it's miraculous or the result of a misunderstanding.”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in "Arthur Miller, Moral Voice of American Stage, Dies at 89" by Marilyn Berger in The New York Times (February 11, 2005)

• “I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of anything.”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in "Arthur Miller, Moral Voice of American Stage, Dies at 89" by Marilyn Berger in The New York Times (February 11, 2005)

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

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in Finding Your Bipolar Muse : How to Master Depressive Droughts and Manic Depression (2006) by Lana R. Castle, p. 258

• “They don't need me in New York. I'm the New England man. I'm vital in New England.”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I simply asked him if he was making any money. Is that a criticism?”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Why must everybody like you?”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Personality always wins the day.”

  Arthur Miller (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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