Quotes from Arthur Miller


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Without alienation, there can be no politics.


I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.


You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.


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.


You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return.


A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.


A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.


Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.


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


I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.


The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality.


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.


A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.


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.


All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.


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?


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.


Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.


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.


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