The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
ARTHUR MILLERWhere choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?
More Arthur Miller Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.
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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.
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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.
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The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life.
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Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
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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.
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I’m the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.
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I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I’d find you coming through some door.
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Without alienation, there can be no politics.
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Can anyone remember love? It’s like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume.
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Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?
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A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can’t live that way you don’t stay.
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I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn’t very difficult.
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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.
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You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.
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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.
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If I see an ending, I can work backward.
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Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way.
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Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not.
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A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
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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.
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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.
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It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not?
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Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.
ARTHUR MILLER