Quotes by Miller, Arthur

"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."

Miller, Arthur on failure   

"If I have any justification for having lived it's simply, I'm nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There's some value in that."

Miller, Arthur on fallibility   

"Without alienation, there can be no politics."

Miller, Arthur on alienation
5 fans of this quote   

"That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?"

Miller, Arthur on literature   

"A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself."

Miller, Arthur on newspapers   

"My conception of the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind; and in this respect at least the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them. If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone."

Miller, Arthur on audiences   

"Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets."

Miller, Arthur on regret
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"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."

Miller, Arthur on sales   

"I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime."

Miller, Arthur on broadway   

"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 bareass 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."

Miller, Arthur on character
3 fans of this quote   

"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."

Miller, Arthur on vision   

"By 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."

Miller, Arthur on theater   

"A playwright is the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great."

Miller, Arthur on theater   

"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."

Miller, Arthur on tragedies   

"I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match."

Miller, Arthur on compatibility