Arthur Miller: Trending quotes

Arthur Miller trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection

Arthur Miller: 294 quotes168 likes

“They don't need me in New York. I'm the New England man. I'm vital in New England.”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Willy Loman
Death of a Salesman (1949)

“I simply asked him if he was making any money. Is that a criticism?”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Willy
Death of a Salesman (1949)

“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.”

National Observer (20 January 1964)

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

The New York Times (9 Feb 1986)

“I do think I see some shred of goodness in John Proctor. Not enough to weave a banner with, but white enough to keep it from such dogs. Give them no tear! Tears pleasure them! Show honor now, show a stony heart and sink them with it!”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

John Proctor
The Crucible (1953)

“In an ordinary crime, how does one defend the accused? One calls up witnesses to prove his innocence. But witchcraft is ipso facto, on its face and by its nature, an invisible crime, is it not? Therefore, who may possibly be witness to it? The witch and the victim. None other. Now we cannot hope the witch will accuse herself; granted? Therefore, we must rely upon her victims — and they do testify, the children certainly do testify. As for the witches, none will deny that we are most eager for all their confessions. Therefore, what is left for a lawyer to bring out? I think I have made my point. Have I not?”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

Deputy Governor Danforth
The Crucible (1953)

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

The New York Herald Tribune (31 March 1954)

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

"The State of the Theatre" an interview by Henry Brandon in Harpers 221 (November 1960)

“The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that.”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Charley
Death of a Salesman (1949)

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

Lyman speaking of his wife to his lawyer, Act 1
The Ride Down Mount Morgan (1991)

“I'll plead no more! I see now your spirit twists around the single error of my life, and I will never tear it free!”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

John Proctor
The Crucible (1953)

“Who weeps for these, weeps for corruption!”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

Deputy Governor Danforth
The Crucible (1953)

“Without alienation, there can be no politics.”

Marxism Today (January 1988)

“I understand his 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.”

On Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, as quoted in The New York Times (9 May 1984)

“We burn a hot fire here; it melts down all concealment.”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

Deputy Governor Danforth
The Crucible (1953)

“Ben, that funeral will be massive! They'll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire! All the old-timers with the strange license plates — that boy will be thunderstruck, Ben, because he never realized — I am known! Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey — I am known, Ben, and he'll see it with his eyes once and for all.”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Willy
Death of a Salesman (1949)

“Wonderful coffee. Meal in itself”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Willy
Death of a Salesman (1949)

“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 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. It isn't easy to do in the theater, but it's twice as hard in film.”

On filming a television production of Death of a Salesman, as quoted in The New York Times (15 September 1985) http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9805E2DE133BF936A2575AC0A963948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

“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 New York Times (9 May 1984)

“Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect.
No tragedy can therefore come about when its author fears to question absolutely everything, when he regards any institution, habit or custom as being either everlasting, immutable or inevitable. In the tragic view the need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star, and whatever it is that hedges his nature and lowers it is ripe for attack and examination.”

Tragedy and the Common Man (1949)