Arthur Miller (1915 – 2005)
American playwright, essayist, and author.
A playwright lives in an occupied country… And if you can't live that way you don't stay.
I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.
Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, "What do you do?" And, being American, many's the time I've almost asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day.
We cannot look to superstition in this. The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone.
Spite, spite, is the word of your undoing!
Writing meant, for him, an effort to locate in the human species a counterforce to the randomness of victimisation.
Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?
It is mistaken law that leads you to sacrifice. Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it. I beg you, woman, prevail upon your husband to confess. Let him give his lie. Quail not before God's judgment in this, for it may well be God damns a liar less than he that throws his life away for pride.
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. And you know I can do it; I saw Indians smash my dear parents' heads on the pillow next to mine, and I have seen some reddish work done at night, and I can make you wish you had never seen the sun go down!
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.
Arthur was the last of the three great theatrical voices of the American century — O'Neill, Williams, Miller. ... Arthur's special achievement was to make political and social plays which belonged on Broadway and yet were also powered to reach out into America and way beyond.
A fire, a fire is burning! I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! And it is my face, and yours, Danforth! For them that quail to bring men out of ignorance, as I have quailed, and as you quail now when you know in all your black hearts that this be fraud — God damns our kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together!
The 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.
Work a lifetime to pay off a house — You finally own it and there's nobody to live in it.
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.
The Crucible became by far my most frequently produced play, both abroad and at home. Its meaning is somewhat different in different places and moments. I can almost tell what the political situation in a country is when the play is suddenly a hit there — it is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past.
The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.
Without alienation, there can be no politics.
Isn't that — isn't that remarkable? Biff — he likes me!
When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die. ... No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion.