Arthur Miller's Quotes

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.

A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.

A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that's what it's for!

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.

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.

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

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

All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.

Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

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.

I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.