Top 100 Arthur Miller Quotes
#1. 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.
Arthur Miller
#2. The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
Arthur Miller
#4. 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.
Arthur Miller
#6. All organisation is and must be grounded on the idea of exclusion and prohibition just as two objects cannot occupy the same space
Arthur Miller
#7. Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain.
Arthur Miller
#8. 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
#9. I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it.
Arthur Miller
#10. I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.
Arthur Miller
#11. I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been.
Arthur Miller
#12. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back
that's an earthquake. And then you get a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished.
Arthur Miller
#13. PROCTOR
he knows it is insane: No, it is not the same! What others say and what i sign to is not the same!
Arthur Miller
#14. The need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star.
Arthur Miller
#15. The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out,
Arthur Miller
#16. To go, Pop. Every muscle is ready. WILLY [at the edge of the apron]: You realize what
Arthur Miller
#17. If you believe that life is worth living then your belief will create the fact.
Arthur Miller
#18. Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.
Arthur Miller
#19. An everlasting funeral marches round your heart.
Arthur Miller
#20. Guido: She wasn't like any other woman. Stood by me 100%, uncomplaining as a tree.
Roslyn: Maybe that's what killed her.
Arthur Miller
#21. So many tremendous decisions in life are made because it is five o'clock.
Arthur Miller
#22. 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.
Arthur Miller
#23. The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.
Arthur Miller
#24. Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not.
Arthur Miller
#25. A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.
Arthur Miller
#26. 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.
Arthur Miller
#27. I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.
Arthur Miller
#28. There are certain men in the world who rather see everybody hung before they'll take blame.
Arthur Miller
#30. 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?
Arthur Miller
#31. We have not many wills, but only one
it cannot be continuously compromised without atrophy setting in altogether.
Arthur Miller
#32. 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.
Arthur Miller
#33. People do look to others for some leadership, and it's not bad for them to supply it when they feel that way.
Arthur Miller
#34. Nevertheless, one learned very early that books had to be respected; they were all putative Bibles and to some small degree had a share in holiness.
Arthur Miller
#35. Playwriting is an oral art; it's not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard.
Arthur Miller
#36. You want somethin' else, Eddie, and you can never have her!
Arthur Miller
#37. THE PRICE grew out of a need to reconfirm the power of the past, the seedbed of current reality, and the way to possibly reaffirm cause and effect in an insane world.
Arthur Miller
#38. Oh, there were many here who were justly shot by unjust men.
Arthur Miller
#39. Self-realization and self-fulfilment are the sine qua non for human existence.
Arthur Miller
#41. Poor brain! How helplessly it dissolves when willing eyes meet and the nose warms to those old jungle scents.
Arthur Miller
#42. A doctor could make a million dollars if he could figure out a way to bring a boy into the world without a trigger finger.
Arthur Miller
#43. 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.
Arthur Miller
#44. Just remember, kid, you can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that you gave away.
Arthur Miller
#45. The word "now" is like a bomb through the window, and it ticks.
Arthur Miller
#46. The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that.
Arthur Miller
#47. The train resembles the Soviet type and is quite comfortable, but all socialist structures I have ever encountered have toilets stemming from a single model engineered by the Orthodox Church in Tsarist Russia to ensure that man never be allowed to forget the corruption of the flesh.
Arthur Miller
#48. Charley: He won't starve. None a them starve. Forget about him.
Willy: Then what have I got to remember?
Arthur Miller
#49. Political opposition ... is given an inhumane overlay, which then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized behavior. A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence.
Arthur Miller
#50. 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.
Arthur Miller
#51. Witch-hunts are always spooked by women's horrifying sexuality awakened by the superstud Devil.
Arthur Miller
#52. 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.
Arthur Miller
#54. I may think of you softly from time to time. But I'll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.
Arthur Miller
#55. Great stones they lay upon his chest until he plead aye or nay. They say he give them but two words. "More weight," he says. And died.
Arthur Miller
#56. Part of knowing who we are is knowing we are not someone else. And Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, the agony we cannot feel, the death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other.
Arthur Miller
#57. The wedding of Christianity or Judaism with nationalism is lethal.
Arthur Miller
#59. Be loving to him. Because he's only a little boat looking for a harbor.
Arthur Miller
#60. Yes, the day the world ended and nobody was innocent again. God, how swiftly it all fell down!
Arthur Miller
#62. HALE, with a tasty love of intellectual pursuit
Arthur Miller
#63. It occurs to me that with all the television people watch, most of their acquaintances are actors.
Arthur Miller
#64. Work a lifetime to pay off a house. you finally own it, and there's nobody to live in it.
Arthur Miller
#66. It was not really possible to understand oneself, let alone another human being.
Arthur Miller
#67. Today, [theatre's] more likely to be consciously not aimed at the public, but at a more sophisticated or educated public ... The result is that some of the sheer humanity has leaked out of the enterprise.
Arthur Miller
#68. Willy: I am building something with this firm, Ben, and if a man is building something he must be on the right track, mustn't he?
Ben: What are you building? Lay your hand on it. where is it?
Willy [hesitantly]: That's true, Linda, there's nothing.
Arthur Miller
#69. I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!
Arthur Miller
#70. You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit.
Arthur Miller
#71. It is time that we, who are without kings, took up this bright thread of our history and followed it to the only place it can possibly lead in our time-the heart and spirit of the average man.
Arthur Miller
#73. Willy: Remember those two beautiful elm trees out there? When I and Biff hung the swings between them?
Linda: Yeah, like being a million miles from the city.
Arthur Miller
#74. There is a kind of perverse unity forming among us, born, I think, of the discontent of all classes of people with the endless frustration of life.
Arthur Miller
#75. The mission of the theatre, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.
Arthur Miller
#76. Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.
Arthur Miller
#78. On the road I want to grab you sometimes and just kiss the life outa you
Arthur Miller
#79. A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that's what it's for!
Arthur Miller
#80. Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it.
Arthur Miller
#81. You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return.
Arthur Miller
#82. Now hell and heaven grapple on our backs and all our old pretense is ripped away. Aye, and God's icy wind will blow.
Arthur Miller
#83. A suicide kills two people ... that's what it's for.
Arthur Miller
#84. After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.
Arthur Miller
#85. 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.
Arthur Miller
#86. 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. My whole bloody life, time after time after time.
Arthur Miller
#87. I'm one-dollar an hour, Willy! I tried seven states and couldn't raise it. A buck an hour! Do you gather my meaning? I'm not bringing home any prizes anymore and you're going to stop waiting for me to bring them home!
Arthur Miller
#88. It is the essence of power that it accrues to those with the ability to determine the nature of the real.
Arthur Miller
#89. Down deep in His heart God is a comedian who loves to make us laugh.
Arthur Miller
#90. A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.
Arthur Miller
#92. 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.
Arthur Miller
#94. A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
Arthur Miller
#95. But you didn't rest your mind. your mind is overactive, and the mind is what counts, dear
Arthur Miller
#96. Mother: What more can we be?
Chris: You can be better! Once and for all you can know there's a universe of people outside and you're responsible to it, and unless you know that you threw away your son because that's how he died.
Arthur Miller
#97. When the law is wrong it's because it's unnatural, but in this case it is natural and a river will drown you if you buck it now
Arthur Miller
#98. A man is not a bird, to come and go with the springtime.
Arthur Miller
#99. I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.
Arthur Miller
#100. Most of the time we settle for half and i like it better, even as i know how wrong he was and his death useless, i tremble for i confess that something peversley pure calls to me from his memory
Arthur Miller
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