Arthur Miller Quotes
Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!
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.
The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.
Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.
A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse.
Work a lifetime to pay off a house You finally own it and there's nobody to live in it.
...When the government goes into the business of destroying trust, it goes into the business of destroying itself.
I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.
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.
I figure I've done what I could do, more or less, and now I'm going back to being a chemical; all we are is a lot of talking nitrogen, you know.
The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.
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.
And yet one can't forever stand on the shore; at some point, even if filled with indecision, skepticism, reservation and doubt, you either jump in or concede that life is forever elsewhere.
The arts can do more to sustain the peace than all the wars, the armaments, and the threats and warnings of politicians.
Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.
Playwriting is an oral art; it's not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard.
Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.
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.
The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.
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.
The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.
A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.
Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.
A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence.
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.
One had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives.
When any creativity becomes useful, it is sucked into the vortex of commercialism, and when a thing becomes commercial, it becomes the enemy of man.
I regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.
In America, any man who is not a reactionary in his views is open to the charge of alliance with the Red hell.
Sometimes...it's better for a man just to walk away. But if you can't walk away? I guess that's when it's tough.
The two greatest plays ever written were Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, and they're both about father-son relationships.