Arthur Miller (1915-2005)
"I have made more
friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made
fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult."
"A play is made by
sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed
irony, the deadly joke."
"A playwright lives in
an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay."
"All we are is a lot
of talking nitrogen."
"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."
"Certainly the most
diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author."
"He wants to live on
through something-and in his case, his masterpiece is his son. all of us want
that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world."
"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."
"I know that my works
are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the
McCarran Act."
"I love her too, but
our neuroses just don't match."
"I think now that the
great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theatre,
or the play-but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem."
"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."
"I'm the end of the
line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in
my lifetime."
"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."
"If I see an ending, I
can work backward."
"In the theatre, 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."
"Maybe all one can do
is hope to end up with the right regrets."
"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 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."
"The best of our theatre
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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The structure of a
play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost."
"The theatre is so
endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life."
"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."
"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."
"Where choice begins,
Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need
to choose this action?"
"Without alienation,
there can be no politics."
"You cannot catch a
child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon
itself return."
"You specialize in
something until one day you find it is specialising in you."
“Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not
make a profit is without value.”
“Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right
regrets.”
“Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.”
“The two most common elements in the world are hydrogen and
stupidity.”
“Everything we are is at every moment alive in us.”
“If a person measures his spiritual fulfilment in terms of
cosmic visions, surpassing peace of mind, or ecstasy, then he is not likely to
know much spiritual fulfilment. If, however, he measures it in terms of
enjoying a sunrise, being warmed by a child's smile, or being able to help
someone have a better day, then he is likely to know much spiritual fulfilment.
”
“A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to
itself.”
“The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos
crying for order - for meaning.”
“If you believe that life is worth living then your belief
will create the fact.”
“The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is
on the verge of embarrassing him, always.”
“A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot
walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse.”
“The world is an oyster but you don't crack it open on a
mattress”
“Betrayal is the only
truth that sucks.”
“Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but
technique. I could not imagine a theatre worth my time that did not want to
change the world.”
“Self-realization and self-fulfilment are the sine qua non
for human existence.”
“The enemy is within, and within stays within, and we can’t
get out of within.”
“The structure of a play
is always the story of how
the birds came home to roost.
is always the story of how
the birds came home to roost.
“All organisation is and must be grounded on the idea of
exclusion and prohibition just as two objects cannot occupy the same space”
