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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.

Arthur Miller

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

Absence Face Humility Question
Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way.
ARTHUR MILLER

Fight Jungle Stranger Way Yourself
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.
ARTHUR MILLER

Love Perfume Remember Rose Smell Yourself
A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
ARTHUR MILLER

Goodness Myself Nation Talk
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.
ARTHUR MILLER

Door Dream Sleep Wake Up Walk Yourself
You cannot catch a child’s spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return.
ARTHUR MILLER

Catch Children Love Return Run
You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.
ARTHUR MILLER

Finding Passion Specialization Work Yourself
A child’s spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.
ARTHUR MILLER

Catch Children Love Return Run Spirit Stand
The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life.
ARTHUR MILLER

Accident Fascination Life Theatre
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

Audience Emotion Observation Play Present Try Writing Yourself
Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.
ARTHUR MILLER

Author Diversity Life Time
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.
ARTHUR MILLER

Attention Character Himself Live Paid
Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?
ARTHUR MILLER

Action Beginning Choice Innocent
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

Beginning Challenge Knowledge Strength Tree
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

Break Computer Element Moments Right Season
A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that’s what it’s for!
ARTHUR MILLER

Kill People Suicide
Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
ARTHUR MILLER

End Hope Oneself Regrets Right
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

Greatness Myself Possible Theatre Thinking
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

Close Commitment Intense Life Man Ourselves Tragedy
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.
ARTHUR MILLER

Camera Home Recognition Theatre Work
If I see an ending, I can work backward.
ARTHUR MILLER

End Myself See Work
A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can’t live that way you don’t stay.
ARTHUR MILLER

Country Live Stay Yourself
All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.
ARTHUR MILLER

Existence Science Talk
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.
ARTHUR MILLER

Cost Episode Experience Feeling Problem Realization
Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.
ARTHUR MILLER

Himself Shape Tools
I think it’s a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one’s self.
ARTHUR MILLER

Hope Mistake Oneself Thinking
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?
ARTHUR MILLER

Age Art Better Focus Necessary Yourself

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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