A biography for Arthur Millerhasn’t been written yet.
“I'm losing weight, you notice, Pop?”
“When it is recalled that until the Christian era the underworld was never regardded as a hostile area, that all gods were useful and essentially friendly to man despite occasional lapsesl when we see the steady methodical inculcation into humanity of the idea of man's worthlesseness - until redeemed - the necessity of the Devil may become evident as a weapon, a weapon designed and used time and time again in every age to whip men into a surrender to a particular church or church state.”
“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.”
“Proctor: I am only wondering how I may prove what she told me, Elizabeth. If the girl's a saint now, I think it is not easy to prove she's fraud, and the town gone so silly. She told it to me in a room alone- I have no proof for it.Elizabeth: You were alone wit”
“You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.”
“When the law is wrong it's because it's unnatural, but in this case it is natural and a river will drown you if you buck it now”
“The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.”
“A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that's what it's for!”
“A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.”
“The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.”
“I don't know what the hell I'm workin' for. Sometimes I sit in my apartment–all alone. And I think of the rent I'm paying. And it's crazy. But then, it's what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, I'm lonely.”
“Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.”
“All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.”
“I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.”
“Will you let me go for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?”
“The enemy is within, and within stays within, and we can’t get out of within.”
“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.”