Arthur Miller Quotes
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The Crucible became by far my most frequently produced play, both abroad and at home. Its meaning is somewhat different in different places and moments. I can almost tell what the political situation in a country is when the play is suddenly a hit there - it is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past.
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I simply asked him if he was making any money. Is that a criticism?
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A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance - you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.
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Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.
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A playwright lives in an occupied country… And if you can't live that way you don't stay.
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I like it not that Mr. Parris should lay his hand upon my baby. I see no light of God in that man. I'll not conceal it.
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Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.
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A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
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And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. 'Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?
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Why must everybody like you?
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Without alienation, there can be no politics.
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We cannot look to superstition in this. The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone.
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An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.
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The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that.
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Now hell and heaven grapple on our backs and all our old pretense is ripped away. Aye, and God's icy wind will blow.
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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.
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We burn a hot fire here; it melts down all concealment.
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A person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is a sharp time, now, a precise time - we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.
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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.
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Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.
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I understand his longing for immortality … Willy's writing his name in a cake of ice on a hot day, but he wishes he were writing in stone.
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Wonderful coffee. Meal in itself
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Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God's fingers? I'll tell you what's walking Salem - vengeance is walking Salem. 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! This warrant's vengeance! I'll not give my wife to vengeance!
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Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.