Arthur Miller Quotes

It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves

Arthur Miller

Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

Arthur Miller

Glamour, that trans-human aura or power to attract imitation, is a kind of vessel into which dreams are poured, and some vessels are simply worthier than others... A beautiful woman can turn heads but real glamour has a deeper pull... Glamour is the power to rearrange people's emotions, which, in effect, is the power to control one's environment.

Arthur Miller

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.

Arthur Miller

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

Arthur Miller

Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

Arthur Miller

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.

Arthur Miller

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

Arthur Miller

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.

Arthur Miller

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

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.

Arthur Miller

Nobody dast blame this man. 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.

Arthur Miller

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.

Arthur Miller

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

Arthur Miller

A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself.

Arthur Miller

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

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.

Arthur Miller

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

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.

Arthur Miller

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

Arthur Miller