Arthur Miller Quotes

. . 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.

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

Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?

There are many who stay away from church these days because you hardly ever mention God any more.

Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.

Chris: I don't know why it is, but every time I reach out for something I want, I have to pull back because other people will suffer.

No one wants the truth if it is inconvenient.

The brain heals the past like an injury.

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.

Jerusalem is ... the fabled city which for the Western mind is as much dream as stone ... a compressed symbol of our most sublime aspirations along with our most disgusting, hatefully brainless excursions into religious bigotry and fratricide.

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

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

My plays are always involved with society, but I'm writing about people, too, and it's clear over the years that audiences understand them and care about them. The political landscape changes, the issues change, but the people are still there. People don't really change that much.

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 bare ass 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.

I still feel-kind of temporary about myself.

What work you do! It's strange work for a Christian girl to hang old women!

HALE, with a tasty love of intellectual pursuit

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

The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect.

I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.

The best of our theater is standing on tiptoe, striving to see over the shoulders of father and mother. The worst is exploiting and wallowing in the self-pity of adolescence and obsessive keyhole sexuality. The way out, as the poet says, is always through.

People do look to others for some leadership, and it's not bad for them to supply it when they feel that way.

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.

They tried to escape technology, to stay away from that and still have relationships with their fellow humans. Very difficult.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

If I have to be alone I want to be by myself.

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

Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.

When the guns roar, the arts die.

The word "now" is like a bomb through the window, and it ticks.

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.

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

Sometimes...it's better for a man just to walk away. But if you can't walk away? I guess that's when it's tough.

The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out.

Playwriting is an oral art; it's not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard.

The world is an oyster but you don't crack it open on a mattress

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.

The world is always ending; the exact date depends on when you came into it.

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

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.

A man is not a bird, to come and go with the springtime.

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

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.

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