Arthur Miller Quotes

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

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

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.

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.

It can take a long time to accept that celebrity is a kind of loneliness.

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

Once when my father was about eighty he asked me, `Do I look like you or do you look like me?` This was serious. `I guess I look like you,` I said. He seemed to like that answer.

My father loved to stand in front of a theater where a play of mine was on and every now and then stroll in to chat with the box office men about business.

(on Marilyn Monroe) If she was simple it would have been easy to help her. She could have made it with a little luck.

Glamour, that trans-human aura or power to attract imitation, is a kind of vessel into which dreams are poured, and some vessels are simply worthier than others... A beautiful woman can turn heads but real glamour has a deeper pull... Glamour (is) the power to rearrange people`s emotions, which, in effect, is the power to control one`s environment.

Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

The jungle is dark but full of diamonds...

The need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star.

Cleave to no faith when faith brings blood.

Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

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.

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

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it`s so accidental. It`s so much like life.

Without alienation, there can be no politics.

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.