Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher Millerwas a prolific American playwright, essayist, and prominent figure in twentieth-century American theatre. Among his most popular plays are All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucibleand A View from the Bridge. He also wrote several screenplays and was most noted for his work on The Misfits. The drama Death of a Salesman is often numbered on the short list of finest American plays in the 20th century alongside Long Day's Journey into Night and A Streetcar...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth17 October 1915
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
... vulgarity has no nation.
Whoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story. People elsewhere tend to accept, to a far greater degree anyway, that the conditions of life are hostile to mans pretensions.
The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out,
The arts can do more to sustain the peace than all the wars, the armaments, and the threats and warnings of politicians.
There are many who stay away from church these days because you hardly ever mention God any more.
Jerusalem is ... the fabled city which for the Western mind is as much dream as stone ... a compressed symbol of our most sublime aspirations along with our most disgusting, hatefully brainless excursions into religious bigotry and fratricide.
Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.
Now hell and heaven grapple on our backs and all our old pretense is ripped away. Aye, and God's icy wind will blow.
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.
You specialize in something until one day it is specializing in you.
The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect.
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 play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.
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.