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 MILLERI’m the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.
More Arthur Miller Quotes
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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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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 -
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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I love her too, but our neuroses just don’t match.
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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 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 -
The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life.
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Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.
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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 -
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 -
All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.
ARTHUR MILLER -
A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can’t live that way you don’t stay.
ARTHUR MILLER -
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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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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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 -
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
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If I see an ending, I can work backward.
ARTHUR MILLER -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Without alienation, there can be no politics.
ARTHUR MILLER -
A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that’s what it’s for!
ARTHUR MILLER -
Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.
ARTHUR MILLER -
I think it’s a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one’s self.
ARTHUR MILLER