Quotes By Arthur Miller

Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.

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

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

He wants to live on through something-and in his case, his masterpiece is his son. all of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

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

Without alienation, there can be no politics.

I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match.

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

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