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.
Arthur MillerWhat 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 MillerI regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.
Arthur MillerLife, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it.
Arthur MillerControlled hysteria is what's required. To exist constantly in a state of controlled hysteria. It's agony. But everyone has agony. The difference is that I try to take my agony home and teach it to sing.
Arthur MillerBy whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.
Arthur MillerI have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.
Arthur MillerIn a dream, we are simply confronted with various loaded symbols, and where one is exhausted, it gives way to another.
Arthur MillerThere is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck in review after review, and in many conversations with writers and readers alike. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism.
Arthur MillerRise early. Write. Disappoint your sons. Read the newspaper. Go to bed early. Success.
Arthur MillerThe job is to ask questions - it always was - and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.
Arthur MillerThe theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.
Arthur MillerGreat stones they lay upon his chest until he plead aye or nay. They say he give them but two words. "More weight," he says. And died.
Arthur MillerWhoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story. People elsewhere tend to accept, to a far greater degree anyway, that the conditions of life are hostile to mans pretensions.
Arthur MillerA little man makes a mistake and they hang him by the thumbs; the big ones become ambassadors.
Arthur MillerNevertheless, one learned very early that books had to be respected; they were all putative Bibles and to some small degree had a share in holiness.
Arthur MillerI think the tragic feeling is invoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing -- his sense of personal dignity.
Arthur MillerPop, 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.
Arthur MillerThere is a kind of perverse unity forming among us, born, I think, of the discontent of all classes of people with the endless frustration of life.
Arthur MillerCharley: He won't starve. None a them starve. Forget about him. Willy: Then what have I got to remember?
Arthur MillerWhen any creativity becomes useful, it is sucked into the vortex of commercialism, and when a thing becomes commercial, it becomes the enemy of man.
Arthur MillerTheater 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.
Arthur MillerThere 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 MillerCertainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.
Arthur MillerThe two greatest plays ever written were Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, and they're both about father-son relationships.
Arthur MillerThe 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 MillerIt may be that even if half consciously, we choose our personalities to maintain a certain saving balance in the family's little universe.
Arthur MillerIt 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 MillerThe task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.
Arthur MillerIn his play depicting the Salem Witch Trials, the author illustrates profound psychological bullying. The ringleader of young girls suspected of unsavory conduct, frightens her friends into silence by warning: Now, look you; All of you. We danced. And Tituba conjured Ruth Putnam's dead sisters, and that was all. ... Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night, and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you.
Arthur MillerI 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 MillerCan 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 MillerThe Greeks used to use the same stories, the same mythology, time after time, different authors. There was no premium placed upon an original story, and indeed, Shakespeare likewise. A lot of people wrote plays about great kings. They didn't expect a brand-new story. It was what that new author made of the old story. It is probably the same now. We disguise it by inventing what seem to be new stories, but they're basically the same story anyway.
Arthur MillerAs 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