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

Arthur Miller

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
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
You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.
ARTHUR MILLER

Finding Passion Specialization Work Yourself
Without alienation, there can be no politics.
ARTHUR MILLER

Alien Politics
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
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.
ARTHUR MILLER

Country Innocent Place See
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
ARTHUR MILLER

Home Play Story Structure
Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.
ARTHUR MILLER

Author Diversity Life Time
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
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
All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.
ARTHUR MILLER

Existence Science Talk
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
I love her too, but our neuroses just don’t match.
ARTHUR MILLER

Herself Love Match Myself
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
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

Death End Life Serious Theatre Time Weird
Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way.
ARTHUR MILLER

Fight Jungle Stranger Way Yourself
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

Dare Myself Nation Talk Work
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
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
Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.
ARTHUR MILLER

Betrayal One Liner Stick Truth
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

Justice Live Simplicity Value
If I see an ending, I can work backward.
ARTHUR MILLER

End Myself See Work
Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not.
ARTHUR MILLER

Goodness Judgement Yourself
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
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
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

Culture Department Difficult Enemy Friendship State
Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.
ARTHUR MILLER

Himself Shape Tools

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

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

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