Arthur Miller Quotes

Arthur Miller stands as one of the greatest American playwrights of his time, famous for plays like Death of a Salesman and The Crucible. Arthur Miller was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Salman Rushdie once called Miller "a man of true moral stature, a rare quality in these degraded days." Here are a few quotes from one of the great American writers, Arthur Miller.

• "A lot of my work goes to the center of where we belong--if there is any root to life -because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don't live in the same place for very long."
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• "A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke."
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• "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."
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• "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."
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• "Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value."
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• "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."
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• "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."
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• "I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self."
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• "I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play-but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem."
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• "I understand Willy Loman's longing for immortality. Willy's writing his name in a cake of ice on a hot day, but he wishes he were writing in stone."
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• "It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not?"
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• "Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not."
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• "Man must shape his tools lest they shape him."
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• "Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets."
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• "The 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."
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• "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."
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• "The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes."
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• "The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life."
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• "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."
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• "What 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."
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• "Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?"
  - Arthur Miller