Arthur Miller Quotes (1915-2005)

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Tragedy enlightens — and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies.”

“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.”

“My argument with so much of psychoanalysis, is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness, when in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people's suffering; that the problem is not to undo suffering or to wipe it off the face of the earth but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to cure ourselves of it constantly and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call "happiness." There's too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him. Of defining him rather than letting him go. It's part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad.”

“To have survived, she would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was. Instead, she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.”

“I read Karel Čapek for the first time when I was a college student long ago in the Thirties. There was no writer like him ... prophetic assurance mixed with surrealistic humour and hard-edged social satire: a unique combination … he is a joy to read.”

“This man directs less than any man in the business. As a matter of fact, he doesn't direct—he doesn't want any actor to give an impression of him playing the part. He wants the actor to create the part—that's why he hired him, because he saw him in this part.”

“I remember reading “Death of a Salesman” in high school and hating it, but when I read it in college I loved it. I was blown away by what Arthur Miller had created.”

“Arthur was the last of the three great theatrical voices of the American century — O'Neill, Williams, Miller. … Arthur's special achievement was to make political and social plays which belonged on Broadway and yet were also powered to reach out into America and way beyond.”

“I have come across several articles by the American playwright Arthur Miller in which he sets out to denounce Stalin's purges and Brezhnev's invasion of Czechoslovakia but ends up denouncing America. Living in America, Arthur Miller wrote all the plays he wanted to write, had them produced, and was amply rewarded by money and fame. He also managed to have everything his heart desired, including the most fabulous blonde of his day. Why then this loathing for America? The only explanation I can think of is that Miller is too self-righteous and self-important to admit the gross stupidity of his Stalinist commitment. He must go on trying to convince the world that there is not much to choose between Russia and America.”

“Arthur Miller has always been the owner of a sound, but essentially minor, talent and no amount of purgation can improve the quality of whatever there may be to follow. As it is, however, those qualities which he has, substantial as they are, always seem to overreach themselves, straining after a magnitude for which they are simply not fitted. And in the few years that he has been away, on Sinai it would seem, Miller has developed an absurd literary hubris, puffing himself up like an idiotic bull-frog in Aesop.”

“The comparison with Reginald Rose is more than a passing snub, for it actually makes reference to an enduring affinity between Miller and the sturdy, footling craftsmen of "liberal" telly. Stripped of its tricks, and with the soliloquies cut, and so on, After the Fall shrinks to its proper proportion, as a sequence of sketches for The Defenders and The Eleventh Hour.”

“In Arthur Miller's writing, which counts on an effect of flatness that is to be found in most of our well-made fiction in this period, the question is used for a kind of sonority, a reverberation of consciousness that actually demands more consciousness and more language. After the inarticulateness of most of his people, we feel relief when a man breaks through and cries to another man: Don't you live in the world? What the hell are you?...What must I do to you?”

“Writing meant, for him, an effort to locate in the human species a counterforce to the randomness of victimisation.”