Quotes from Arthur Miller

Willy: Figure it out. Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there's nobody to live in it.

An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted.

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.

...When the government goes into the business of destroying trust, it goes into the business of destroying itself.

... if you love your country why is it necessary to hate other countries?

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.

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

No one wants the truth if it is inconvenient.

I am bewildered by the death of love. And my responsibility for it.

Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be … when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am.

Fear, like love, is difficult to explain after it has subsided, probably because it draws away the veils of illusion as it disappears.

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds come home to roost.

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.

In America, any man who is not a reactionary in his views is open to the charge of alliance with the Red hell.

Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not.

The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.

A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself.

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

The word "now" is like a bomb thrown through the window, and it ticks.

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

The wedding of Christianity or Judaism with nationalism is lethal.

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

Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

Sometimes...it's better for a man just to walk away. But if you can't walk away? I guess that's when it's tough.