Arthur miller quotes

In America, any man who is not a reactionary in his views is open to the charge of alliance with the Red hell.

Immortality is like trying to carve your initials in a block of ice in the middle of July.

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.

Those who formally rule take their signals and commands not from the electorate as a body, but from a small group of men. This group will be called the Establishment. It exists even though that existence is stoutly denied. It is one of the secrets of the American social order... A second secret is the fact that the existence of the Establishment - the ruling class - is not supposed to be discussed.

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.

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

I'm sure there are writers who are great businessmen, but I never met any.

The enemy is within, and within stays within, and we can't get out of within.

For the political world, I have come to believe, is fundamentally beyond anyone's control, yet we all go on as though it were a kind of vehicle that only needs a change of drivers in order to steer it away from its frequent hair-raising visits to the edge of the cliff.

I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self.

When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die. ... No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion.

And old Dave, he'd go up to his room, y'understand, put on his green velvet slippers - I'll never forget - and pick up his phone and call the buyers, and without leaving his room, at the age of eighty-four, he made his living. And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want.

Work a lifetime to pay off a house You finally own it and there's nobody to live in it.

Life is an endless, truly endless struggle. There's no time when we're going to arrive at a plateau where the whole thing gets sorted. It's a struggle in the way every plant has to find it's own way to stand up straight. A lot of the time it's a failure. And yet it's not a failure if some enlightenment comes from it.

A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence.

Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.

Success, instead of giving freedom ofchoice, becomes a way of life.

But we are mostly what we are, and the turtle stretching toward delicious buds on high does not lighten his carapace by his resolve.

Well, I spent six or seven years after high school trying to work myself up. Shipping clerk, salesman, business of one kind or another. And it's a measly manner of existence. To get on that subway on the hot mornings in summer. To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying. To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off. And always to have to get ahead of the next fella. And still — that's how you build a future.

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 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.

Without alienation, there can be no politics.

The parochial snobbery of these people was partly responsible for their failure to convert the Indians. Probably they also preferred to take land from heathens rather than from fellow Christians. At any rate, very few Indians were converted, and the Salem folk believed that the virgin forest was the Devil's last preserve, his home base and the citadel of his final stand. To the best of their knowledge the American forest was the last place on earth that was not paying homage to God.

The Greeks used to use the same stories, the same mythology, time after time, different authors. There was no premium placed upon an original story, and indeed, Shakespeare likewise. A lot of people wrote plays about great kings. They didn't expect a brand-new story. It was what that new author made of the old story. It is probably the same now. We disguise it by inventing what seem to be new stories, but they're basically the same story anyway.

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

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

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

The witch-hunt was a perverse manifestation of the panic which set in among all classes when the balance began to turn toward greater individual freedom. The witch-hunt was not, however, a mere repression. It was also, and as importantly, a long overdue opportunity for everyone so inclined to express publicly his guilt and sins, under the cover of accusations against the victims.

No one wants the truth if it is inconvenient.

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

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

By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.

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!

Whoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story. People elsewhere tend to accept, to a far greater degree anyway, that the conditions of life are hostile to mans pretensions.

The jungle is dark but full of diamonds, Willy.

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

It occurs to me that with all the television people watch, most of their acquaintances are actors.

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.

I’m a writer, and everything I write is both a confession and a struggle to understand things about myself and this world in which I live. This is what everyone’s work should be-whether you dance or paint or sing. It is a confession, a baring of your soul, your faults, those things you simply cannot or will not understand or accept. You stumble forward, confused, and you share. If you’re lucky, you learn something.

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

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.

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.

Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.

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 writer must be in it; he can't be to one side of it, ever. He has to be endangered by it. His own attitudes have to be tested in it. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing himself, always.

I believe in work. If somebody doesn't create something, however small it may be, he gets sick. An awful lot of people feel that they're treading water -- that if they vanished in smoke, it wouldn't mean anything at all in this world. And that's a despairing and destructive feeling. It'll kill you.

The two greatest plays ever written were Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, and they're both about father-son relationships.

How to live had started out as an analytical problem of how to place himself so as to intercept the flow of money in the society.

You cant get very far in this world without your dossier being there first.

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

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.

The brain heals the past like an injury.

God really does take our work seriously: It is wrong, it is a sin, to accept or remain in a position that you know is a mismatch for you. Perhaps that's a form of sin you've never considered - the sin of staying in the wrong job. But God did not place you on the earth to waste away your years in labor that does not employ his design or purpose for your life, no matter how much you may be getting paid for it.

The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect.

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.

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.

When today fails to offer the justification for hope, tomorrow becomes the only grail worth pursuing.

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 realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been.

The arts can do more to sustain the peace than all the wars, the armaments, and the threats and warnings of politicians.

Controlled hysteria is what's required. To exist constantly in a state of controlled hysteria. It's agony. But everyone has agony. The difference is that I try to take my agony home and teach it to sing.

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.

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

Every time I am reading actors I can pretty well tell which ones have studied with Meisner. It is because they are honest and simple and don't lay on complications that aren't necessary.

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

I came out of a culture in which my uncle, my father - they were all salesmen of one kind or another. My father was a manufacturer. He also, in effect, had to sell that stuff. And if he didn't literally do it, his men did. So, selling was in the air through my boyhood. The whole idea of successfully selling was very important.

If you analyse anything, you destroy it.

Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.

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

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.

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.

I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it.

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.

If I see an ending, I can work backward.

A play's an interpretation. It is not a report. And that is the beginning of its poetry because, in order to interpret, you have to distort toward a symbolic construction of what happened, and as that distortion takes place, you begin to leave out and overemphasize and consequently deliver up life as a unity rather than as a chaos, and any such attempt, the more intense it is, the more poetic it becomes.

The world is always ending; the exact date depends on when you came into it.

Chris: I don't know why it is, but every time I reach out for something I want, I have to pull back because other people will suffer.

It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves

It was not really possible to understand oneself, let alone another human being.

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

Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.

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

The best of our theater is standing on tiptoe, striving to see over the shoulders of father and mother. The worst is exploiting and wallowing in the self-pity of adolescence and obsessive keyhole sexuality. The way out, as the poet says, is always through.

I would be twenty before I learned how to be fifteen, thirty before I knew what it meant to be twenty, and now at seventy-two I have to stop myself from thinking like a man of fifty who has plenty of time ahead.

My plays are always involved with society, but I'm writing about people, too, and it's clear over the years that audiences understand them and care about them. The political landscape changes, the issues change, but the people are still there. People don't really change that much.

Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.

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

Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, "What do you do?" And, being American, many's the time I've almost asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day.

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.

Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!

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.

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.

Everything we are is at every moment alive in us.

The wedding of Christianity or Judaism with nationalism is lethal.

Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

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

When the guns roar, the arts die.

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.

Playwriting is an oral art; it's not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard.

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

Studies show that a trusting workplace increases employees' level of happiness, work effort, productivity, and engagement. It also provides an environment that encourages open communication and promotes people to share their ideas.

I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.

...When the government goes into the business of destroying trust, it goes into the business of destroying itself.

As a writer, I've always believed that while my work and I myself are embedded in whatever period I am writing about, clearly I am sensitive to the winds that are blowing in the culture. At the same time, I have always felt that the issue was not to deal with the problem in the abstract, but to deal with the people who are in that problem. The emphasis is on the people. The general problem begins to resolve itself even before the play is finished.

The Crucible became by far my most frequently produced play, both abroad and at home. Its meaning is somewhat different in different places and moments. I can almost tell what the political situation in a country is when the play is suddenly a hit there it is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past.

... if you love your country why is it necessary to hate other countries?

Willy Loman: I don't want change, I want Swiss cheese!

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.

Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

I don't say he's a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. 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. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.

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.

An idol tells people exactly what to believe, God presents them with choices they have to make for themselves. The difference is far from insignificant; before the idol men remain dependent children, before God they are burdened and at the same time liberated to participate in the decisions of endless creation.

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.

Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain.

Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.

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

Self-realization and self-fulfilment are the sine qua non for human existence.

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 mission of the theatre, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.

I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.

If a person measures his spiritual fulfillment in terms of cosmic visions, surpassing peace of mind, or ecstasy, then he is not likely to know much spiritual fulfillment. If, however, he measures it in terms of enjoying a sunrise, being warmed by a child's smile, or being able to help someone have a better day, then he is likely to know much spiritual fulfillment.

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.