Quotes from Arthur Miller

I regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.

You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit.

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

Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

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.

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

The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.

If I see an ending, I can work backward.

A lot of my work goes to the center of where we belong--if there is any root to life -because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don't live in the same place for very long.

Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.

I am older than everyone I ever knew. All my dogs are dead. Half a dozen cats, parakeets... all gone.

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.

Like every writer, I am asked where my work originates, and if I knew I would go there more often to find more.

I'm a fatalist.... I consider I am rejected in principle. My work is and, through my work, I am. If it's accepted, it's miraculous or the result of a misunderstanding.

I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.

Playwriting is an oral art; it's not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard.

When the guns roar, the arts die.

A playwright... is... the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about.

Theater is a very changeable art. It responds to the moment in history the way the newspaper does, and there's no predicting what to come up with next.

The car, the furniture, the wife, the children - everything has to be disposable. Because you see the main thing today is - shopping.

Work a lifetime to pay off a house. you finally own it, and there's nobody to live in it.

Betrayal is the only truth that sticks

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

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