Arthur Miller

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Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright, essayist, and author.

1 Sourced
2 Attributed
3 External links

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Sourced

I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn’t very difficult.
- After being refused a passport for his supposed disloyalty. The New York Herald Tribune (31 March 1954)

I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.
- The New York Herald Tribune (31 March 1954)

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
- Harper’s (August 1958)

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.
- Collected Plays (1958) Introduction, Section 1

My conception of the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind; and in this respect at least the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them. If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.
- Collected Plays (1958) Introduction, Section 2

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.
- Collected Plays (1958) Introduction, Section 7

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.
- National Observer (20 January 1964)

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.
- National Observer (20 January 1964)

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.
- National Observer (20 January 1964)

Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?
- After the Fall (1964) Foreword

I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self. One day the house smells of fresh bread, the next of smoke and blood. One day you faint because the gardener cuts his finger off, within a week you're climbing over corpses of children bombed in a subway. What hope can there be if that is so? I tried to die near the end of the war. The same dream returned each night until I dared not to go to sleep and grew quite ill. 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 onto my lap again, clutched at my clothes. Until I thought, if I could kiss it, whatever in it was 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.
- After the Fall (1964)

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.
- Commenting on After the Fall (1964) in The Saturday Evening Post (1 February 1964)

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.
- Life (7 February 1964)

A playwright ... is ... the litmus paper of the arts. He’s got to be, because if he isn’t working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he’s great.
- Paris Review (Summer 1966)

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.
- Paris Review (Summer 1966)

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 dehumanization 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.
- Paris Review (Summer 1966)

I understand his longing for immortality … Willy’s writing his name in a cake of ice on a hot day, but he wishes he were writing in stone.
- On Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman ; The New York Times (9 May 1984)

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.
- On Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman ; The New York Times (9 May 1984)

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life.
- The New York Times (9 May 1984)

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 New York Times (9 May 1984)

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.
- The New York Times (15 September 1985) Speaking of a television production of Death of a Salesman.

If I see an ending, I can work backward.
- The New York Times (9 Feb 1986)

A playwright lives in an occupied country…. And if you can’t live that way you don’t stay.
- The New York Times (9 Feb 1986)

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.
- The New York Times (9 Feb 1986)

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.
- Marxism Today (January 1988)

Without alienation, there can be no politics.
- Marxism Today (January 1988)

I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.
- The Times (11 January 1989)

That is a very good question. I don’t know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?
- His reply to a shoe manufacturer who had asked why Miller’s job should be subsidized when his was not, as recounted at a London press conference. The Guardian (25 January 1990)

From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying striggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his "rightful" place in society.
- Tragedy and the Common Man (27 February 1949)

Tragedy, then, is the consequence of man's total compulsion to evaluate himself.
- Tragedy and the Common Man (27 February 1949)

Only the passive, only those who accept their lot without active retaliation, are "flawless." Most of us are in that category.
- Tragedy and the Common Man (27 February 1949)

No tragedy can therefore come about when its author fears to question absolutely everything, when he regards any institution, habit, or custom as being either everlasting, immutable, or inevitable.
- Tragedy and the Common Man (27 February 1949)

Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.
- The New Yorker: Why I Wrote 'The Crucible' (Issue of 1996-10-21)

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Death of a Salesman (1949)

They don't need me in New York. I'm the New England man. I'm vital in New England.

I simply asked him if he was making any money. Is that a criticism?

I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life.

I'm very well liked in Hartford. You know, the trouble is, Linda, people don't seem to take to me.

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

I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. 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. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.

A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.

Personality always wins the day.

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.

You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away – a man is not a piece of fruit.

After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.

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

Ben, that funeral will be massive! They'll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire! All the old-timers with the strange license plates — that boy will be thunderstruck, Ben, because he never realized— I am known! Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey — I am known, Ben, and he'll see it with his eyes once and for all.

Spite, spite, is the word of your undoing!

You cut your life down for spite!

Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!

Isn’t that— isn’t that remarkable? Biff— he likes me!

Nobody dast blame this man. Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. 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 yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. ’Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?

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The Crucible (1953)

I will come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you . . .. I can make you wish you had never seen the sun go down!

There are wheels within wheels in this village, and fires within fires!

Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!

I have trouble enough without I come five mile to hear him preach only hellfire and bloody damnation. Take it to heart, Mr. Parris. There are many others who stay away from church these days because you hardly ever mention God any more.

You will not judge me more, Elizabeth. I have good reason to think before I charge fraud on Abigail, and I will think on it. Let you look to your own improvement before you go to judge your husband anymore.

I'll plead no more! I see now your spirit twists around the single error of my life, and I will never tear it free!

I like it not that Mr. Parris should lay his hand upon my baby. I see no light of God in that man. I'll not conceal it.

I have seen too many frightful proofs in court - the Devil is alive in Salem, and we dare not quail to follow wherever the accusing finger points!

I'll tell you what's walking Salem— vengeance is walking Salem. 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! This warrant's vengeance! I'll not give my wife to vengeance!

A person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between.

A fire, a fire is burning! I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! And it is my face, and yours, Danforth! For them that quail to bring men out of ignorance, as I have quailed, and as you quail now when you know in all your black hearts that this be fraud— God damns our kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together!

It is mistaken law that leads you to sacrifice. Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it . . . it may well be God damns a liar less than he that throws his life away for pride.

I do think I see some shred of goodness in John Proctor. Not enough to weave a banner with, but white enough to keep it from such dogs. Give them no tear! Tears pleasure them! Show honor now, show a stony heart and sink them with it!

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The Ride Down Mount Morgan (1991)

I love her too, but our neuroses just don’t match.
- Lyman speaking of his wife to his lawyer (Act 1)

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets. (Act 1)

Look, we’re all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house—in the bedroom he’s asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room he’s rolling around with some bareass girl, in the library he’s paying his taxes, in the yard he’s raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he’s making a bomb to blow it all up.
- Lyman (Act 2)

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Attributed

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

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

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.

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

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

Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

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.

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

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

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.