Quotes from Arthur Miller

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.

Without alienation, there can be no politics.

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 inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more and not merely to spend our feelings.

I have not moved from there to here without I think to please you, and still an everlasting funeral marches round your heart.

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

I am inclined to notice the ruin in things, perhaps because I was born in Italy.

Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

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

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

For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that's an earthquake.

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

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.

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.

A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not?

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

A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself.

A man can't go out the way he came in… a man has got to add up to something!

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. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great.

He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.

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.

Nobody dast blame this man. For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back -- that's an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

Everything we are is at every moment alive in us.

Just remember, kid, you can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that you gave away.