457 Quotes by Arthur Miller

The witch-hunt was a perverse manifestation of the panic which set in among all classes when the balance began to turn toward greater individual freedom. The witch-hunt was not, however, a mere repression. It was also, and as importantly, a long overdue opportunity for everyone so inclined to express publicly his guilt and sins, under the cover of accusations against the victims.

There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck in review after review, and in many conversations with writers and readers alike. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism.

Without alienation, there can be no politics.

How to live had started out as an analytical problem of how to place himself so as to intercept the flow of money in the society.

A lot of my work goes to the center of where we belong--if there is any root to life -because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don't live in the same place for very long.

Down deep in His heart God is a comedian who loves to make us laugh.

The play is really a kind of nightmare. It ought to flow rapidly and effortlessly from one moment to another. In London, we had difficulty with the set, which required too much effort to move around. Having gotten the benefit of seeing it done once, I wanted to work on the script, to make it sharper and more pointed.

A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.

Today, [theatre's] more likely to be consciously not aimed at the public, but at a more sophisticated or educated public. . . . The result is that some of the sheer humanity has leaked out of the enterprise.