black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

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
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
A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that’s what it’s for!
ARTHUR MILLER

Kill People Suicide
If I see an ending, I can work backward.
ARTHUR MILLER

End Myself See Work
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
ARTHUR MILLER

Home Play Story Structure
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 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 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 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
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
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 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
Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not.
ARTHUR MILLER

Goodness Judgement Yourself
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
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
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

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Arthur Miller Quotes