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
A little man makes a mistake and they hang him by the thumbs; the big ones become ambassadors.
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.
The success of a play, especially one's first success, is somewhat like pushing against a door which is suddenly opened that was always securely shut until then. For myself, the experience was invigorating. It suddenly seemed that the audience was a mass of blood relations, and I sensed a warmth in the world that had not been there before. It made it possible to dream of daring more and risking more.
Success, instead of giving freedom ofchoice, becomes a way of life.
My plays are always involved with society, but I'm writing about people, too, and it's clear over the years that audiences understand them and care about them. The political landscape changes, the issues change, but the people are still there. People don't really change that much.
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.
You cant get very far in this world without your dossier being there first.
A play's an interpretation. It is not a report. And that is the beginning of its poetry because, in order to interpret, you have to distort toward a symbolic construction of what happened, and as that distortion takes place, you begin to leave out and overemphasize and consequently deliver up life as a unity rather than as a chaos, and any such attempt, the more intense it is, the more poetic it becomes.
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.
I'm sure there are writers who are great businessmen, but I never met any.
The arts can do more to sustain the peace than all the wars, the armaments, and the threats and warnings of politicians.
I'm a fatalist.... I consider I am rejected in principle. My work is and, through my work, I am. If it's accepted, it's miraculous or the result of a misunderstanding.
Part of knowing who we are is knowing we are not someone else. And Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, the agony we cannot feel, the death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other.
The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out,