Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be … when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am.
Arthur MillerThat is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?
Arthur MillerI'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.
Arthur MillerThe 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.
Arthur MillerFew 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.
Arthur MillerPeace. It is a providence, and no great change; we are only what we always were, but naked now.
Arthur MillerA 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.
Arthur MillerGod 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.
Arthur MillerA 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 MillerIn 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 MillerStudies show that a trusting workplace increases employees' level of happiness, work effort, productivity, and engagement. It also provides an environment that encourages open communication and promotes people to share their ideas.
Arthur MillerPathos 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.
Arthur MillerAmericans 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.
Arthur MillerBecause it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!
Arthur MillerOne had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives.
Arthur Millermost 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
Arthur MillerIn America, any man who is not a reactionary in his views is open to the charge of alliance with the Red hell.
Arthur MillerA 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.
Arthur MillerI don't say he's a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. 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. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.
Arthur MillerThe culture of the United States has flooded the world. It's the inevitable result of a powerful culture, art. We've got an instinctive touch when it comes to the popular mind because we've had no aristocracy. It is a democratic country. And we know without knowing it, without bothering to understand it, how to reach ordinary people, sometimes with the most vulgar, worthless junk on the face of the earth, but we know how to do it [laughter].
Arthur MillerPoor brain! How helplessly it dissolves when willing eyes meet and the nose warms to those old jungle scents.
Arthur MillerToday, [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 MillerAn 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.
Arthur MillerFlight 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.
Arthur MillerThere is unquestionably a contradiction between an efficient technological machine and the flowering of human nature, of the human personality.
Arthur MillerIt is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves
Arthur MillerI believe in work. If somebody doesn't create something, however small it may be, he gets sick. An awful lot of people feel that they're treading water -- that if they vanished in smoke, it wouldn't mean anything at all in this world. And that's a despairing and destructive feeling. It'll kill you.
Arthur MillerThe problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.
Arthur MillerA play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.
Arthur MillerPROCTOR--he knows it is insane: No, it is not the same! What others say and what i sign to is not the same!
Arthur MillerThey 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."
Arthur Miller