Arthur Miller Quotes

I regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.

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.

The word "now" is like a bomb through the window, and it ticks.

Just remember, kid, you can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that you gave away.

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.

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.

A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.

When the guns roar, the arts die.

I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.

The car, the furniture, the wife, the children - everything has to be disposable. Because you see the main thing today is - shopping.

Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?

The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone.

A playwright... is... the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about.

I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.

He's liked, but he's not well liked.

The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that.

After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.

Be liked and you will never want.

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.

If you analyse anything, you destroy it.

If I see an ending, I can work backward.

If I have to be alone I want to be by myself.

I think the tragic feeling is invoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing -- his sense of personal dignity.

The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order - for meaning.

Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain.

I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theatre, or the play - but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.

A suicide kills two people, that's what it's for!

A friend of mine once said that there were only two truly national events in the history of the United States. One was the Civil War and the other one was the Depression.

The jungle is dark but full of diamonds, Willy.

Poor brain! How helplessly it dissolves when willing eyes meet and the nose warms to those old jungle scents.

I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match.

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.

A lot of my work goes to the center of where we belong--if there is any root to life -because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don't live in the same place for very long.

There might be a dragon with five legs in my house, but no one has ever seen it.

He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him!

Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it.

I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life.

When a deposit bottle is broken, you don't get your nickel back.

I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been.

Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be … when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am.

You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit.

Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not.

HALE, with a tasty love of intellectual pursuit

A little man makes a mistake and they hang him by the thumbs; the big ones become ambassadors.

The brain heals the past like an injury.

The wedding of Christianity or Judaism with nationalism is lethal.

The world is an oyster but you don't crack it open on a mattress

There are many who stay away from church these days because you hardly ever mention God any more.

The famous are balloons far up in the sky, to be envied for their quiet freedom or shot down as enemies.