Arthur Miller

“I think the tragic feeling is evoked 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.”

“Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.”

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

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

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

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

“I could not imagine a theatre worth my time that did not want to change the world.”

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

“The world is an oyster, but you don't crack it open on a mattress.”

“The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.”

“He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that's an earthquake.”

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

“Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.”

“The job is to ask questions—it's not to give answers. You have to ask questions that trouble the audience.”

“Without alienation, there can be no politics.”

“We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”

“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.”

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