Arthur Miller Quotes

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.

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.

No one wants the truth if it is inconvenient.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Everything we are is at every moment alive in us.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

If you analyse anything, you destroy it.

Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain.

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

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

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!

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.

The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.