Arthur Miller Quotes

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.

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.

Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.

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.

Oh,Elizabeth, your justice would freeze beer.

Work a lifetime to pay off a house You finally own it and there's nobody to live in it.

The 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

Can 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.

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

Without alienation, there can be no politics.

Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

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

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

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

A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that's what it's for!

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.

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.

Cleave to no faith when faith brings blood.

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.

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.

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

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

The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.

A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.