Best 189 quotes of Arthur Miller on MyQuotes

Arthur Miller

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    Arthur Miller

    Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect.

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    Arthur Miller

    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.

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    Arthur Miller

    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.

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    Arthur Miller

    A friend of mine once said that there were only two truly national events in the history of the United States. One was the Civil War and the other one was the Depression.

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    Arthur Miller

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

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    Arthur Miller

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

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    Arthur Miller

    A genuine invention in the realm of ideas must first emerge as an abstruse and even partial concept? At first blusha new idea appearstobe verycloseto insanity because to be new it must reverse important basic beliefs and assumptions which, in turn, have been institutionalized and are administered by one or another kind of priesthood with a vested interest in an old idea.

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    Arthur Miller

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

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    Arthur Miller

    A lot of my work goes to the center of where we belong--if there is any root to life -because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don't live in the same place for very long.

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    Arthur Miller

    Americans don't speak foreign languages, by and large. Their interest in anything beyond the borders of the country is limited. A European of any cultivation has to speak a couple of languages; he inevitably without being very thoughtful about it gets to understand what other people think about him.

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    Arthur Miller

    Amos Oz is one of the finest novelists of this entire period. MY MICHAEL is a beautiful work of great depth and in some indescribable way lingers in the mind as a lyric song to his country's people as much as a moving love story.

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    Arthur Miller

    And old Dave, he'd go up to his room, y'understand, put on his green velvet slippers - I'll never forget - and pick up his phone and call the buyers, and without leaving his room, at the age of eighty-four, he made his living. And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want.

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    Arthur Miller

    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.

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    Arthur Miller

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

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    Arthur Miller

    An idol tells people exactly what to believe, God presents them with choices they have to make for themselves. The difference is far from insignificant; before the idol men remain dependent children, before God they are burdened and at the same time liberated to participate in the decisions of endless creation.

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    Arthur Miller

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

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    Arthur Miller

    A play's an interpretation. It is not a report. And that is the beginning of its poetry because, in order to interpret, you have to distort toward a symbolic construction of what happened, and as that distortion takes place, you begin to leave out and overemphasize and consequently deliver up life as a unity rather than as a chaos, and any such attempt, the more intense it is, the more poetic it becomes.

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    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.

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    Arthur Miller

    A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.

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    Arthur Miller

    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.

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    Arthur Miller

    A suicide kills two people, that's what it's for!

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    Arthur Miller

    Be liked and you will never want.

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    Arthur Miller

    But we are mostly what we are, and the turtle stretching toward delicious buds on high does not lighten his carapace by his resolve.

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    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.

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    Arthur Miller

    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.

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    Arthur Miller

    Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

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    Arthur Miller

    Cleave to no faith when faith brings blood.

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    Arthur Miller

    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.

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    Arthur Miller

    Data is a lot like humans: It is born. Matures. Gets married to other data, divorced. Gets old. One thing that it doesn't do is die. It has to be killed.

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    Arthur Miller

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

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    Arthur Miller

    Down deep in His heart God is a comedian who loves to make us laugh.

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    Arthur Miller

    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.

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    Arthur Miller

    Few occasions are as joyous to small children as funerals, almost better than the big wedding blowouts that take place at night when it's hard to stay awake. A small boy will never be harshly criticized at a funeral; he is more treasured as death comes close and all his wickedness vanishes before the inescapable fact that thank God, he is healthy.

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    Arthur Miller

    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.

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    Arthur Miller

    Flight Reservation Systems decide whether or not you exist. If your information isn't in their database, then you simply don't get to go anywhere.

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    Arthur Miller

    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.

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    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.

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    Arthur Miller

    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.

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    Arthur Miller

    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.

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    Arthur Miller

    HALE, with a tasty love of intellectual pursuit

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    Arthur Miller

    He's liked, but he's not well liked.

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    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.

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    Arthur Miller

    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.

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    Arthur Miller

    I am bewildered by the death of love. And my responsibility for it.

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    Arthur Miller

    I came out of a culture in which my uncle, my father - they were all salesmen of one kind or another. My father was a manufacturer. He also, in effect, had to sell that stuff. And if he didn't literally do it, his men did. So, selling was in the air through my boyhood. The whole idea of successfully selling was very important.

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    Arthur Miller

    I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I'd find you coming through some door.

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    Arthur Miller

    I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of anything.

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    Arthur Miller

    If a person measures his spiritual fulfillment in terms of cosmic visions, surpassing peace of mind, or ecstasy, then he is not likely to know much spiritual fulfillment. If, however, he measures it in terms of enjoying a sunrise, being warmed by a child's smile, or being able to help someone have a better day, then he is likely to know much spiritual fulfillment.

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    Arthur Miller

    I figure I've done what I could do, more or less, and now I'm going back to being a chemical; all we are is a lot of talking nitrogen, you know.

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    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.