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Arthur Miller Quotes
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Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright, essayist, and a controversial figure in the twentieth-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are All My Sons , Death of a Salesman , The Crucible and A View from the Bridge . He wrote several screenplays and was most noted for his work on The Misfits . The drama Death of a Salesman has been numbered on the short list of finest American plays in the 20th century.

Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was married to Marilyn Monroe. In 1980, Miller received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. He received the Prince of Asturias Award, the Praemium Imperiale prize in 2002 and the Jerusalem Prize in 2003, as well as the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 1999. Wikipedia  

✵ 17. October 1915 – 10. February 2005
Arthur Miller photo
Arthur Miller: 147   quotes 168   likes

Arthur Miller Quotes

“Who weeps for these, weeps for corruption!”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

Deputy Governor Danforth
The Crucible (1953)

“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)

Life , Error , Tear

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

Arthur Miller

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

Love

“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)

World

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

Arthur Miller

The New York Herald Tribune (31 March 1954)

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

Arthur Miller

The New York Times (9 Feb 1986)

Way , Country

“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.”

Arthur Miller

National Observer (20 January 1964)

Problem , Thinking

“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)

Money

“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)

“Spite, spite, is the word of your undoing!”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Willy
Death of a Salesman (1949)

“Nothing's Planted, I don't have a thing in the ground.”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Willy
Death of a Salesman (1949)

“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.”

Arthur Miller

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

World

“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.”

Arthur Miller

National Observer (20 January 1964)

Question

“I'm very well liked in Hartford. You know, the trouble is, Linda, people don't seem to take to me.”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Willy
Death of a Salesman (1949)

People

“The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.”

Arthur Miller

Harper's (August 1958)

Home , Bird

“I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.”

Arthur Miller

The Times (11 January 1989)

“Look, we're all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house — in the bedroom he's asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room he's rolling around with some bareass girl, in the library he's paying his taxes, in the yard he's raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he's making a bomb to blow it all up.”

Arthur Miller

Lyman, Act 2
The Ride Down Mount Morgan (1991)

Girl , Intelligence , Housing

“And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. 'Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Willy
Death of a Salesman (1949)

Love , People , Age , Help

“Now hell and heaven grapple on our backs and all our old pretense is ripped away. Aye, and God's icy wind will blow.”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

John Proctor
The Crucible (1953)

God , Hell

“We're free and clear, Willy. We're free, we're free, we're free…”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Linda
Death of a Salesman (1949)

“Hale: Here is all the invisible world, caught, defined, and calculated. In these books the Devil stands stripped of all his brute disguises. Here are all your familiar spirits — your incubi and succubi; your witches that go by land, by air, and by sea; your wizards of the night and of the day. Have no fear now — we shall find him out if he has come among us, and I mean to crush him utterly if he has shown his face!
Rebecca: Will it hurt the child, sir?
Hale: I cannot tell. If she is truly in the Devil's grip we may have to rip and tear to get her free.”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

The Crucible (1953)

Books , World , Fear , Tear

“I like it not that Mr. Parris should lay his hand upon my baby. I see no light of God in that man. I'll not conceal it.”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

John Proctor
The Crucible (1953)

God , Light , Baby

“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.”

Arthur Miller

"It Could Happen Here - And Did," http://books.google.com/books?id=SxkSdaCoHL8C&pg=PA295&dq=%22arthur+miller%22+%22panic+button%22&ei=E4VoR9-SMI34iwHf9LFo&ie=ISO-8859-1&sig=f0iKJxpOGjd5_Zs83QcNtAWLpH0 New York Times (30 April 1967); also in The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (1996)

Training

“I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of anything.”

Arthur Miller

As quoted in "Arthur Miller, Moral Voice of American Stage, Dies at 89" by Marilyn Berger in The New York Times (11 February 2005)

“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.”

Arthur Miller

The New York Times (9 Feb 1986)