Arthur Miller Quotes

The shadow of a cornstalk on the ground is lovely, but it is no denial of its loveliness to see as one looks on it that it is telling the time of day, the position of the earth and the sun, the size of our planet and its shape, and perhaps even the length of its life and ours among the stars.

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.

Be liked and you will never want.

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

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

Be loving to him. Because he's only a little boat looking for a harbor.

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.

Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.

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.

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.

What is the key word today? Disposable. The more you can throw it away the more it's beautiful. The car, the furniture, the wife, the children - everything has to be disposable. Because you see the main thing today is - shopping. Years ago a person, he was unhappy, didn't know what to do with himself - he'd go to church, start a revolution - something. Today you're unhappy? Can't figure it out? What is the salvation? Go shopping ...
... If they would close the stores for six months in this country there would be from coast to coast a regular massacre.

In an ordinary crime, how does one defend the accused? One calls up witnesses to prove his innocence. But witchcraft is ipso facto, on its face and by its nature an invisible crime, is it not? The witch and the victim. None other. Now we cannot hope the witch will accuse herself; granted? Therefore, we must rely upon her victims - and they do testify, the children certainly do testify.

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.

You cant get very far in this world without your dossier being there first.

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!

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.

The only thing you've got in this world is what you can sell.

The growing sensitivity of people to any sort of open and frank discussion of important issues is no service to civilisation, let alone law and order. I wrote a play about a man who happened to be a salesman, and several organisations of sales people flew to arms. Now it is the lawyers. If I am to back away from these objections you must surely see that I shall be forced to write about people with no occupation whatever.

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.

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.

The witch-hunt was a perverse manifestation of the panic which set in among all classes when the balance began to turn toward greater individual freedom. The witch-hunt was not, however, a mere repression. It was also, and as importantly, a long overdue opportunity for everyone so inclined to express publicly his guilt and sins, under the cover of accusations against the victims.

Guido: She wasn't like any other woman. Stood by me 100%, uncomplaining as a tree.
Roslyn: Maybe that's what killed her.

[W]e conceive the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable view of cosmology. Ours is a divided empire in which certain ideas and emotions and actions are of God, and their opposites are of Lucifer. It is as impossible for most men to conceive of a morality without sin as of an earth without 'sky'. Since 1692 a great but superficial change has wiped out God's beard and the Devil's horns, but the world is still gripped between two diametrically opposed absolutes. The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon - such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas.

You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return.

Fear, like love, is difficult to explain after it has subsided, probably because it draws away the veils of illusion as it disappears.

I'm a fatalist ... I consider I am rejected in principle. My work is and, through my work, I am. If it's accepted, it's miraculous or the result of a misunderstanding.

The parochial snobbery of these people was partly responsible for their failure to convert the Indians. Probably they also preferred to take land from heathens rather than from fellow Christians. At any rate, very few Indians were converted, and the Salem folk believed that the virgin forest was the Devil's last preserve, his home base and the citadel of his final stand. To the best of their knowledge the American forest was the last place on earth that was not paying homage to God.

I'm sure there are writers who are great businessmen, but I
never met any.

If I see an ending, I can work backward.

You never do any good until you get into some trouble.

Willie was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to life?. 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.

Pop, I'm nothing! I'm nothing, Pop. Can't you understand that? There's no spite in it any more. I'm just what I am, that's all.

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

it's the proper morning to fly into Hell.

Charley: He won't starve. None a them starve. Forget about him.
Willy: Then what have I got to remember?

Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible. And it is curious, although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after century, are the tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the belief-optimistic, if you will, in the perfectibility of man.

What victory would the Devil have to win a soul already bad? It is the best the Devil wants, and who is better than the minister." - Rev. John Hale

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.

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.

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

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.

Sex, sin, and the Devil were early linked.

Willy Loman: I don't want change, I want Swiss cheese!

So many tremendous decisions in life are made because it is five o'clock.

HALE, with a tasty love of intellectual pursuit

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.

How can they whip cheese?

You make mountains out of molehills.

Everything we are is at every moment alive in us.

An everlasting funeral marches round your heart.

We used to shoot a man who acted like a dog, but honor was real there, you were protecting something. But here? This is the land of the great big dogs, you don't love a man here, you eat him! That's the principle ; the only one we live by.

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.

Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

Oh,Elizabeth, your justice would freeze beer.

PROCTOR, his mind wild, breathless: I say
I say
God is dead!

The success of a play, especially one's first success, is somewhat like pushing against a door which is suddenly opened that was always securely shut until then. For myself, the experience was invigorating. It suddenly seemed that the audience was a mass of blood relations, and I sensed a warmth in the world that had not been there before. It made it possible to dream of daring more and risking more.

Knowing smile on his face: What's this mischief here?

When one rises above the individual villainy displayed, one can only pity them all, just as we shall be pitied some day.

The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order - for meaning.

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

Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

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!

They know your name, address, telephone number, credit card numbers, who ELSE is driving the car "for insurance", ... your driver's license number. In the state of Massachusetts, this is the same number as that used for Social Security, unless you object to such use. In THAT case, you are ASSIGNED a number and you reside forever more on the list of "weird people who don't give out their Social Security Number in Massachusetts."

Like every writer, I am asked where my work originates, and if I knew I would go there more often to find more.

There is a problem on the so-called commercial stage in New York. The price of a ticket is exorbitant, and there are no longer original productions possible, apparently, on the commercial stage. They are all plays that were taken from either England or smaller theaters, off-Broadway theaters, and so on. The one justification there used to be for the commercial theater was that it originated everything we had, and now it originates nothing. But the powers that be seem perfectly content to have it that way. They don't risk anything anymore, and they simply pick off the cream.

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

A wild thing may say wild things. But not so wild, I think.

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.

The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.

You don't realize how people can hate, they can hate so much they'll tear the world to pieces.

I am sick of meetings; cannot the man turn his head without he have a meeting?

HAPPY: All right, boy. I'm gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It's the only dream you can have
to come out number-one man.

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.

Self-realization and self-fulfilment are the sine qua non for human existence.

The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone ...

The two greatest plays ever written were Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, and they're both about father-son relationships.

A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.

Because most people ain't people.

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

I stopped in the middle of that building and I saw - the sky. I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time time to sit and smoke. And I looked at the pen and said to myself, what the hell am I grabbing this for? 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! Why can't I say that, Willy?

The wedding of Christianity or Judaism with nationalism is lethal.

I am still feeling kinda temporary about myself

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

Will you let me go for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?

A suicide kills two people ... that's what it's for.

He plough on Sunday, Sir.
Plough on Sunday?!

I don't know what the hell I'm workin' for. Sometimes I sit in my apartment–all alone. And I think of the rent I'm paying. And it's crazy. But then, it's what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, I'm lonely.

it is an allegory of our times.

To go, Pop. Every muscle is ready. WILLY [at the edge of the apron]: You realize what

Usually, the biggest problems of adapting plays into screenplays is that they stick too close to the play, and I think film is a completely different medium. I think a novel is much closer to a film ...

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.

Oh, there were many here who were justly shot by unjust men.

There are certain people, the sicker they get the longer they live.

If you believe that life is worth living then your belief will create the fact.

The famous are balloons far up in the sky, to be envied for their quiet freedom or shot down as enemies.

Theater is a very changeable art. It responds to the moment in history the way the newspaper does, and there's no predicting what to come up with next.

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 ...

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.

Does it take more guts to stand here the rest of my life ringing up a zero?

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.