Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Arthur Miller (American Playwright)

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) was an American playwright best known for All My Sons (1947,) Death of a Salesman (1949,) The Crucible (1953,) and other plays that analyzed the American dream and social conscience.

Miller was born in New York City to an affluent owner of a coat factory. His family lost everything in the stock market crash of 1929 and lived in noticeably reduced circumstances during the Great Depression. His life experiences shaped Miller’s dramatic mission, and his subjects and themes.

In high school, Miller was more absorbed in sports than studies. After graduating from high school in 1932, he went to work in an auto parts warehouse in Manhattan. It was during his subway commute to and from his work that Miller began reading books, discovering both the power of serious literature to change the way one sees the world. He once declared, “A book that changed my life was Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov which I picked up. I don’t know how or why, and all at once believed I was born to be a writer.”

Miller was accepted as a journalism student at the University of Michigan where he wrote his first play (despite having seen only two plays years before) to contest for prize money he needed for tuition. He failed in his first attempt but eventually won the award twice. After graduation, he returned to New York City. He had his first professional premiere with his play The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944,) but it closed after just four performances on Broadway. He refused to concede defeat though.

Within a few years, Miller’s All My Sons (1947) ran for 328 performances, won a Tony Award, and was made into a movie the following year. It premiered 18 months after Imperial Japan surrendered in World War II, and audiences were ready for a back-from-the-war story. All My Sons was about a man who sold faulty machinery to the Army and finds out that he has caused the death of 21 soldiers.

Miller’s most famous play, Death of a Salesman (1949) remains as popular as ever. Narrating the last 24 hours of the aging and failing traveling salesman Willy Loman who is betrayed by the American dream, Death of a Salesman realizes its outstanding tenacity and propose from an extraordinarily intimate and staunch portrait of a family divided by its collective dreams and confined by its unspoken secrets. The play won a Tony, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Miller earned praise censure for his critique of American life and values.

Miller is also famous for his four-year-marriage to Marilyn Monroe, during which, Miller created nothing for the stage but produced his first film script, The Misfits (1960,) starring his wife.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Arthur Miller

The word “now” is like a bomb thrown through the window, and it ticks.
Arthur Miller
Topics: Carpe-diem, The Present

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.
Arthur Miller
Topics: Perfection

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.
Arthur Miller
Topics: Illusion

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.
Arthur Miller
Topics: Failure

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

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

Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.
Arthur Miller
Topics: Thinking

Nobody dast blame this man. For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. 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. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.
Arthur Miller
Topics: Shopping

I love her too, but our neuroses just don’t match.
Arthur Miller

Without alienation, there can be no politics.
Arthur Miller

Look, we’re all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house—in the bedroom he’s asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room he’s rolling around with some bareass girl, in the library he’s paying his taxes, in the yard he’s raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he’s making a bomb to blow it all up.
Arthur Miller
Topics: Character, Virtues, Men

Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.
Arthur Miller
Topics: One liners, Betrayal

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.
Arthur Miller
Topics: Television

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
Arthur Miller
Topics: Regret, Life

That is a very good question. I don’t know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?
Arthur Miller
Topics: Literature, Books

A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself.
Arthur Miller
Topics: News

A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.
Arthur Miller
Topics: People

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.
Arthur Miller
Topics: Dreams

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.
Arthur Miller
Topics: Audiences

Glamour, that trans-human aura or power to attract imitation, is a kind of vessel into which dreams are poured, and some vessels are simply worthier than others… A beautiful woman can turn heads but real glamour has a deeper pull… Glamour is the power to rearrange people’s emotions, which, in effect, is the power to control one’s environment.
Arthur Miller
Topics: Fashion

By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more and not merely to spend our feelings.
Arthur Miller
Topics: Audiences, Theater

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

Fear, like love, is difficult to explain after it has subsided, probably because it draws away the veils of illusion as it disappears.
Arthur Miller

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
Topics: Theater

My conception of the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind; and in this respect at least the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them. If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.
Arthur Miller
Topics: Audiences, Praise

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.
Arthur Miller
Topics: Tragedy

The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.
Arthur Miller

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