Arthur Miller Quotes - Page 3

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

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

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.

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.

Without alienation, there can be no politics.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

If I see an ending, I can work backward.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

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

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

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.

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

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.