Quotes from Arthur Miller

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.

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

Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.

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.

When any creativity becomes useful, it is sucked into the vortex of commercialism, and when a thing becomes commercial, it becomes the enemy of man.

Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it.

I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been.

I think the tragic feeling is invoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing -- his sense of personal dignity.

I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life.

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.

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.

Success, instead of giving freedom ofchoice, becomes a way of life.

... so many tremendous decisions in life are made because it is five o'clock.

Immortality is like trying to carve your initials in a block of ice in the middle of July.

There is a kind of perverse unity forming among us, born, I think, of the discontent of all classes of people with the endless frustration of life.

I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self.

I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I'd find you coming through some door.

The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.

Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?

The best of our theater 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.

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.

By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.

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.