Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright, essayist, and author.
Found 50 thoughts of Arthur Miller
Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.
Arthur Miller
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.
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
A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that's what it's for!
Arthur Miller
I dreamed I had a child, and even in the dream I saw it was my life, and it was an idiot, and I ran away. But it always crept on to my lap again, clutched at my clothes. Until I thought, if I could kiss it, whatever in it is my own, perhaps I could sleep. And I bent to its broken face, and it was horrible....but I kissed it. I think one must finally take one's life in one's arms.
Arthur Miller
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 Miller
I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self.
Arthur Miller
Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.
Arthur Miller
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.
Arthur Miller
Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not.
Arthur Miller
If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanisation of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp. . . . The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.
Arthur Miller
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
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
A man is not an orange. You can't eat the fruit and throw the peel away
Arthur Miller
A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.
Arthur Miller
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
The world is an oyster, but you don't crack it open on a mattress.
Arthur Miller
A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.
Arthur Miller
Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?
Arthur Miller
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
Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.
Arthur Miller
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
