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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.
ARTHUR MILLER, "Tragedy and the Common Man"
A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.
ARTHUR MILLER, Death of a Salesman
Theology, sir, is a fortress; no crack in a fortress may be accounted small.
ARTHUR MILLER, The Crucible
One had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives.
ARTHUR MILLER, "The Shadows of the Gods"
I do not believe that any work of art can help but be diminished by its adherence at any cost to a political program ... and not for any other reason than that there is no political program -- any more than there is a theory of tragedy -- which can encompass the complexities of real life.
ARTHUR MILLER, Introduction to Collected Plays
The Jungle is dark but full of diamonds.
ARTHUR MILLER, Death of a Salesman
I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self.
ARTHUR MILLER, After the Fall
Cleave to no faith when faith brings blood.
ARTHUR MILLER, The Crucible
Society is inside of man and man is inside society, and you cannot even create a truthfully drawn psychological entity on the stage until you understand his social relations and their power to make him what he is and to prevent him from being what he is not. The fish is in the water and the water is in the fish.
ARTHUR MILLER, "The Shadows of the Gods"
A man is not an orange. You can't eat the fruit and throw the peel away.
ARTHUR MILLER, Death of a Salesman
Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
ARTHUR MILLER, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan
The shadow of a cornstalk on the ground is lovely, but it is no denial of its loveliness to see as one looks on it that it is telling the time of day, the position of the earth and the sun, the size of our planet and its shape, and perhaps even the length of its life and ours among the stars.
ARTHUR MILLER, "The Shadows of the Gods"
All socialist structures I have ever encountered have toilets stemming from a single model engineered by the Orthodox Church in Tsarist Russia to ensure that man never be allowed to forget the corruption of the flesh.
ARTHUR MILLER, Salesman in Beijing
Everything influences playwrights. A playwright who isn't influenced is never of any use. He's 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.
ARTHUR MILLER, Conversations with Arthur Miller
A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
ARTHUR MILLER, London Observer, November 1961
Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, "What do you do?" And, being American, many's the time I've almost asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day.
ARTHUR MILLER, Paris Review, Summer 1966
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