Arthur Miller
Work a lifetime to pay off a house You finally own it and there's nobody to live in it.Collection: House
I would be twenty before I learned how to be fifteen, thirty before I knew what it meant to be twenty, and now at seventy-two I have to stop myself from thinking like a man of fifty who has plenty of time ahead.Collection: Men
If you analyse anything, you destroy it.Collection: Ifs
The brain heals the past like an injury.Collection: Past
Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.Collection: Beauty
Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain.Collection: Pain
The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.Collection: Writing
The writer must be in it; he can't be to one side of it, ever. He has to be endangered by it. His own attitudes have to be tested in it. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing himself, always.Collection: Fun
When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die. ... No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion.Collection: Men
... so many tremendous decisions in life are made because it is five o'clock.Collection: Decision
Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be … when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am.Collection: Who I Am
Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it.Collection: Crucible
Willie was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to life?. 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.Collection: Smile
It occurs to me that with all the television people watch, most of their acquaintances are actors.Collection: People
There is a kind of perverse unity forming among us, born, I think, of the discontent of all classes of people with the endless frustration of life.Collection: Frustration
I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life.Collection: Done
A doctor could make a million dollars if he could figure out a way to bring a boy into the world without a trigger finger.Collection: Boys
most of the time we settle for half and i like it better, even as i know how wrong he was and his death useless, i tremble for i confess that something peversley pure calls to me from his memoryCollection: Memories
The world is an oyster but you don't crack it open on a mattressCollection: Oysters
I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.Collection: Father
A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.Collection: Men
Studies show that a trusting workplace increases employees' level of happiness, work effort, productivity, and engagement. It also provides an environment that encourages open communication and promotes people to share their ideas.Collection: Happy
If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.Collection: Communication
...an everlasting funeral marches round your heart.Collection: Heart
I am bewildered by the death of love. And my responsibility for it.Collection: Life
There is unquestionably a contradiction between an efficient technological machine and the flowering of human nature, of the human personality.Collection: Technology
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.Collection: Talking
People do look to others for some leadership, and it's not bad for them to supply it when they feel that way.Collection: People
There are many who stay away from church these days because you hardly ever mention God any more.Collection: Crucible
Tragedy enlightens - and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies.Collection: Men
There is a problem on the so-called commercial stage in New York. The price of a ticket is exorbitant, and there are no longer original productions possible, apparently, on the commercial stage. They are all plays that were taken from either England or smaller theaters, off-Broadway theaters, and so on. The one justification there used to be for the commercial theater was that it originated everything we had, and now it originates nothing. But the powers that be seem perfectly content to have it that way. They don't risk anything anymore, and they simply pick off the cream.Collection: New York
I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of anything.Collection: Critics
They know your name, address, telephone number, credit card numbers, who ELSE is driving the car "for insurance", ... your driver's license number. In the state of Massachusetts, this is the same number as that used for Social Security, unless you object to such use. In THAT case, you are ASSIGNED a number and you reside forever more on the list of "weird people who don't give out their Social Security Number in Massachusetts."Collection: Life
The need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star.Collection: Stars
The famous are balloons far up in the sky, to be envied for their quiet freedom or shot down as enemies.Collection: Sky
Like every writer, I am asked where my work originates, and if I knew I would go there more often to find more.Collection: Ifs
The culture of the United States has flooded the world. It's the inevitable result of a powerful culture, art. We've got an instinctive touch when it comes to the popular mind because we've had no aristocracy. It is a democratic country. And we know without knowing it, without bothering to understand it, how to reach ordinary people, sometimes with the most vulgar, worthless junk on the face of the earth, but we know how to do it [laughter].Collection: Country
A genuine invention in the realm of ideas must first emerge as an abstruse and even partial concept? At first blusha new idea appearstobe verycloseto insanity because to be new it must reverse important basic beliefs and assumptions which, in turn, have been institutionalized and are administered by one or another kind of priesthood with a vested interest in an old idea.Collection: Ideas
... vulgarity has no nation.Collection: Vulgarity
There might be a dragon with five legs in my house, but no one has ever seen it.Collection: Dragons
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.Collection: Business
Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible. And it is curious, although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after century, are the tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the belief-optimistic, if you will, in the perfectibility of man.Collection: Lying
Charley: He won't starve. None a them starve. Forget about him. Willy: Then what have I got to remember?Collection: Remember
It is time that we, who are without kings, took up this bright thread of our history and followed it to the only place it can possibly lead in our time-the heart and spirit of the average man.Collection: Kings
THE PRICE grew out of a need to reconfirm the power of the past, the seedbed of current reality, and the way to possibly reaffirm cause and effect in an insane world.Collection: Past
The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.Collection: Expression
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 bare ass 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.Collection: Girl
Peace. It is a providence, and no great change; we are only what we always were, but naked now.Collection: Crucible