Arthur Miller Quotes

When a deposit bottle is broken, you don't get your nickel back. ~ Arthur Miller

On the day the world is blown up, the playwright whose show opened the night before will be leafing past the news section of the Times to find his review
as he ascends through the stratosphere, oblivious. ~ Arthur Miller

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. ~ Arthur Miller

Everything we are is at every moment alive in us. ~ Arthur Miller

[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. ~ Arthur Miller

Now that Marilyn Monroe is kosher, Arthur Miller can eat her. ~ Oscar Levant

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

I still feel-kind of temporary about myself. ~ Arthur Miller

My salvation is that I never took any interest in anything. ~ Arthur Miller

The play is really a kind of nightmare. It ought to flow rapidly and effortlessly from one moment to another. In London, we had difficulty with the set, which required too much effort to move around. Having gotten the benefit of seeing it done once, I wanted to work on the script, to make it sharper and more pointed. ~ Arthur Miller

Chris: For me! Where do you live, where have you come from? For me!
I was dying every day and you were killing my boys and you did it for me? What the hell do you think I was thinking of, the Goddamn business? Is that as far as your mind can see, the business? What is that , the world
the business? What the hell do you mean, you did it for me? Don't you have a country? Don't you live in the world? What the hell are you? You're not even an animal, no animal kills his own, what are you? ~ Arthur Miller

I do a lot of American plays. I've done a lot of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Neil Simon. I was in 'Sisters Rosensweig,' 'Six Degrees of Separation,' all of that stuff. So we're very familiar with America. I did 400 performances of 'Born Yesterday.' I did 700 performances of 'They're Playing Our Song.' ~ Jacki Weaver

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

Elizabeth, with sarcasm and a sense of being lost: Oh indeed! Indeed! ~ 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. ~ Arthur Miller

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. ~ Arthur Miller

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

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

In America, any man who is not a reactionary in his views is open to the charge of alliance with the Red hell. ~ Arthur Miller

The mission of the theatre, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities. ~ Arthur Miller

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

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! ~ Arthur Miller

I would be twenty before I learned how to be fifteen, thirty before I knew what it meant to be twenty, and now at seventy-two I have to stop myself from thinking like a man of fifty who has plenty of time ahead. ~ Arthur Miller

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

We must re-imagine liberty in every generation, especially since a certain number of people are always afraid of it. ~ Arthur Miller

I am still feeling kinda temporary about myself ~ Arthur Miller

Here is all the invisible world, caught, defined, and calculated. In these books the Devil stands stripped of all his brute disguises. Here are all your familiar spirits-your incubi and succubi; your witches that go by land, by air, and by sea; your wizards of the night and of the day. Have no fear now-we shall find him out and I mean to crush him utterly if he has shown his face! ~ 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. ~ Arthur Miller

The brain heals the past like an injury ... ~ Arthur Miller

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. ~ Arthur Miller

Be liked and you will never want. ~ Arthur Miller

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

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

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

It occurs to me that with all the television people watch, most of their acquaintances are actors. ~ Arthur Miller

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

Try to keep the rebel artist alive in you, no matter how attractive or exhausting the temptation. ~ Arthur Miller

it's the proper morning to fly into Hell. ~ Arthur Miller

We burn a hot fire here; it melts down all concealment. ~ 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. ~ Arthur Miller

Without alienation, there can be no politics. ~ Arthur Miller

And it was the idea that you can do a play - like a Shakespeare play, or any well-written play, Arthur Miller, whatever - and say things you could never imagine saying, never imagine thinking in your own life. ~ James Earl Jones

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. ~ Arthur Miller

When today fails to offer the justification for hope, tomorrow becomes the only grail worth pursuing. ~ Arthur Miller

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

I look for John Proctor that took me from my sleep and put knowledge in my heart! I never knew what pretence Salem was, I never knew the lying lessons I was taught by all these Christian women and their covenanted men! And now you bid me tear the light out of my eyes! I will not, I cannot! You loved me, John Proctor, and whatever sin it is, you love me yet! ~ Arthur Miller

I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it. ~ Arthur Miller

I personally think that what the big (writers) have in common is a fierce moral sensibility, which is unquenchable and they are all burning with the same anger at the way the world is.
The little ones have made a peace with it, and the bigger ones can't make any peace. ~ Arthur Miller

I should hang ten thousand that dared to rise against the law, and an ocean of salt tears could not melt the resolution of the statutes. ~ Arthur Miller

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

Arthur Miller wouldn't have married me if I had been nothing but a dumb blonde. ~ Marilyn Monroe

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. ~ Arthur Miller

When it is recalled that until the Christian era the underworld was never regardded as a hostile area, that all gods were useful and essentially friendly to man despite occasional lapsesl when we see the steady methodical inculcation into humanity of the idea of man's worthlesseness - until redeemed - the necessity of the Devil may become evident as a weapon, a weapon designed and used time and time again in every age to whip men into a surrender to a particular church or church state. ~ 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. ~ Arthur Miller

If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you've got it half licked. ~ Arthur Miller

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. ~ Arthur Miller

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

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

The arts can do more to sustain the peace than all the wars, the armaments, and the threats and warnings of politicians. ~ Arthur Miller

You have made your magic now ~ Arthur Miller

cleave not to faith when faith brings blood." - Rev. John Hale ~ Arthur Miller

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

There might be a dragon with five legs in my house, but no one has ever seen it. ~ Arthur Miller

I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult. ~ Arthur Miller

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

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

I could tell you things about Louis that wouldn't make you wave at him no more ~ 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. ~ Arthur Miller

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. ~ 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

Witch-hunts are always spooked by women's horrifying sexuality awakened by the superstud Devil. ~ Arthur Miller

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

I'm losing weight, you notice, Pop? ~ Arthur Miller

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

I'm a writer, and everything I write is both a confession and a struggle to understand things about myself and this world in which I live. This is what everyone's work should be-whether you dance or paint or sing. It is a confession, a baring of your soul, your faults, those things you simply cannot or will not understand or accept. You stumble forward, confused, and you share. If you're lucky, you learn something. ~ Arthur Miller

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 ~ Arthur Miller

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

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

SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY - NOT QUITE YOUNG ANYMORE, BUT NOT OLD EITHER; A LITTLE BREATHLESS, VERY BEAUTIFUL, MAYBE A LITTLE STUPID, MAYBE A LOT SMARTER THAN SHE SEEMED. AND SHE WAS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING - I THINK SHE WANTED TO BE GOOD. LOOK AT THE MEN IN HER LIFE - JOE DIMAGGIO, ARTHUR MILLER, MAYBE THE KENNEDYS. LOOK AT HOW GOOD THEY SEEM! LOOK AT HOW DESIRABLE SHE WAS! THAT'S WHAT SHE WAS: SHE WAS DESIRABLE. SHE WAS FUNNY AND SEXY - AND SHE WAS VULNERABLE, TOO. SHE WAS NEVER QUITE HAPPY, SHE WAS ALWAYS A LITTLE OVERWEIGHT. SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY, ~ John Irving

MAGGIE, in pain: That's what I mean; I'm a joke to most people.
QUENTIN: No, it's that you say what you mean, Maggie. You don't seem to be upholding anything, you're not - ashamed of what you are.
MAGGIE: W-what do you mean, of what I am?
... But you didn't, did you?
He turns to her in agony.
Laugh at me?
QUENTIN: No. He suddenly stands and cries out to Listener. Fraud! From the first five minutes! ... Because! I should have agreed she was a joke, a beautiful piece, trying to take herself seriously! Why did I lie to her, play this cheap benefactor, this - Listens, and now unwillingly he turns back to her.
MAGGIE: Like when you told me to fix where my dress was torn? You wanted me to be - proud of myself. Didn't you? ~ Arthur Miller

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life. ~ Arthur Miller

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. ~ Arthur Miller

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

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. ~ 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. ~ Arthur Miller

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

Figure it out. Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there's nobody o live in it. ~ Arthur Miller

How can they whip cheese? ~ Arthur Miller

Show them a stony heart and sink them with it ~ Arthur Miller

When I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich. ~ Arthur Miller

He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him! ~ Arthur Miller

He plough on Sunday, Sir.
Plough on Sunday?! ~ Arthur Miller

When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die ... No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion. ~ Arthur Miller

Don't take it on yourself. Forget now. Live. ~ Arthur Miller

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. ~ Arthur Miller

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

HALE, with a tasty love of intellectual pursuit ~ Arthur Miller

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