Arthur Miller Fansite

 

Arthur Miller Quotes

 

• A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.

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

• That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker.

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

• All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.

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

• Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• Don't take it on yourself. Forget now. Live.

• The word 'now' is like a bomb thrown through the window, and it ticks.

• Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

• Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• A man is not an orange. You can't eat the fruit and throw the peel away.

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

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

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

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

• If I see an ending, I can work backward.

• It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not?

• 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.

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

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

• Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

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

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

• It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not?

• That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• If I see an ending, I can work backward.

• 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.

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

• You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return.

• Without alienation, there can be no politics.

• You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.

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

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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 Selected Works

2004 - Finishing the Picture (play)
2002 - Resurrection Blues (play)
1998 - Mr Peter’s Connections (play)
1995 - The Crucible (screenplay)
1994 - Broken Glass (play)
1992 - Homely Girl (short story)
1991 - The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (play)
1991 - The Last Yankee (play)
1987 - Clara (play)
1987 - I Can’t Remember Anything (play)
1986 - I Think About You a Great Deal (play)
1985 - Playing for Time (stage play)
1984 - Everybody Wins (sceenplay)
1982 - Some Kind Of Love Story (play)
1982 - Elegy for a Lady (play)
1980 - Playing for Time (television play)
1980 - The American Clock (play)
1977 - The Archbishop's Ceiling (play)
1972 - The Creation of the World and Other Business (play)
1970 - The Reason Why (radio play)
1970 - Fame (television play)
1968 - The Price (play)
1967 - I Don’t Need You Anymore (short stories)
1964 - Incident At Vichy (play)
1964 - After the Fall (play)
1961 - The Misfits (screen play)
1957 - The Misfits (short story)
1955 - A Memory of Two Mondays (play)
1955 - A View from the Bridge (play)
1953 - The Crucible (play)
1950 - An Enemy Of The People (play)
1949 - Death of a Salesman (play)
1947 -The Hook (film)
1947 - The Story of Gus (radio play)
1947 - All My Sons (play)
1947 - Three Men on a Horse (radio play)
1946 - Focus (novel)
1945 - The Story of G.I. Joe (film)
1944 - Pride and Prejudice (radio play)
1944 - The Guardsman (radio play)
1944 - The Philippines Never Surrendered (radio play)
1944 - Grandpa and the Statue (radio play)
1944 - I Love You (radio play)
1943 - Bernardine (radio play)
1943 - Listen for the Sound of Wings (radio play)
1943 - That They May Win (radio play)
1943 - The Half-Bridge (play)
1942 - The Four Freedoms (radio play)
1942 - The Eagle’s Nest (radio play)
1942 - Toward a Farther Star (radio play)
1942 - I Was Married in Bataan (radio play)
1942 - Thunder from the Mountains (radio play)
1942 - The Battle of the Ovens (radio play)
1941 - Captain Paul (radio play)
1941 - Jed Chandler Harris (radio play)
1941 - William Ireland’s Confession (radio play)
1941 - The Pussycat and the Plumber Who Was a Man (radio play)
1940 - The Man Who Had All the Luck (play)
1940 - The Golden Years (play)
1939 - Listen My Children (play)
1938 - The Great Disobedience (play)
1938 - The Grass Still Grows (play)
1938 - Honors At Dawn (play)
1937 - They Too Arise (play)
1936 - No Villian (play)

Useful Links:

Arthur Millar Society Official Web Site