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Arthur Miller Quotes


If I see an ending, I can work backward.

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.

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?

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

Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Without alienation, there can be no politics.

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

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