Arthur Miller Quotes

United States, Playwright
October 17, 1915 – February, 10, 2005.

Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright, essayist, and figure in twentieth-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953) and A View from the Bridge (1955, revised 1956). He also wrote several screenplays and was most noted for his work on The Misfits (1961). The drama Death of a Salesman has been numbered on the short list of finest American plays in the 20th century alongside Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire.

Also known as Essayist

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.

Arthur Miller
- Job
- Humility
A playwright … is … 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. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great.

Arthur Miller
- Great

They don't need me in New York. I'm the New England man. I'm vital in New England.

Arthur Miller
Sit down, Willy.

Arthur Miller
Work a lifetime to pay off a house - You finally own it and there's nobody to live in it.

Arthur Miller
- Work
- Live
- House
Isn't that - isn't that remarkable? Biff - he likes me!

Arthur Miller
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.

Arthur Miller
- World
- Live
- Son
I figure I've done what I could do, more or less, and now I'm going back to being a chemical; all we are is a lot of talking nitrogen, you know...

Arthur Miller
- Done

The best of our theater is standing on tiptoe, striving to see over the shoulders of father and mother. The worst is exploiting and wallowing in the self-pity of adolescence and obsessive keyhole sexuality. The way out, as the poet says, is always through.

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

Arthur Miller
- May
- Serious