Arthur Miller quotes

Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

Arthur Miller

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.

Arthur Miller

A man is not an orange. You can't eat the fruit and throw the peel away.

Arthur Miller

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

Arthur Miller

Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.

Arthur Miller

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

Arthur Miller

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

Arthur Miller

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.

Arthur Miller

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

Arthur Miller

If I see an ending, I can work backward.

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.

Arthur Miller

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

Arthur Miller

Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

Arthur Miller

The job is to ask questions, it always was, and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.

Arthur Miller

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

Arthur Miller

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

Arthur Miller

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?

Arthur Miller

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.

Arthur Miller

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

Arthur Miller

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

Arthur Miller

That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?

Arthur Miller

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

Arthur Miller

Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

Arthur Miller

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

Arthur Miller

A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it, you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.

Arthur Miller

All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.

Arthur Miller

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.

Arthur Miller

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.

Arthur Miller

Without alienation, there can be no politics.

Arthur Miller

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

Arthur Miller

Don't take it on yourself. Forget now. Live.

Arthur Miller

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

Arthur Miller

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

Arthur Miller

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.

Arthur Miller

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.

Arthur Miller