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Arthur Miller Biography

Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright, essayist, and figure in twentieth-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953) and A View from the Bridge (1955, revised 1956). He also wrote several screenplays and was most noted for his work on The Misfits (1961). The drama Death of a Salesman has been numbered on the short list of finest American plays in the 20th century alongside Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire.

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Arthur Miller Quotes

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.

Curious, Lying, Man, Men, Optimistic, Pessimist

The Greeks used to use the same stories, the same mythology, time after time, different authors. There was no premium placed upon an original story, and indeed, Shakespeare likewise. A lot of people wrote plays about great kings. They didn't expect a brand-new story. It was what that new author made of the old story. It is probably the same now. We disguise it by inventing what seem to be new stories, but they're basically the same story anyway.

Expect, Kings, People, Play, Shakespeare, Use

What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.

Country, Insane, Life, People, Place

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 memory

Half, Memories, Peversley, Useless, Wrong

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.

Cities, Dream, Fabled, Hatefully, Religious, Sublime

I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.

Art, Chosen, Job, Jobs, People, Thinking

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.

Attitude, Embarrassing, Fun, Side, Tested, Writing

The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.

Discover, Intellectual, Order, Real

Data is a lot like humans: It is born. Matures. Gets married to other data, divorced. Gets old. One thing that it doesn't do is die. It has to be killed.

Born, Data, Gets, Married, Thing

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.

Alone, Business, Carrying, Men, Thinking, Thinks

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.

Idea, Ideas, Pessimism, Readers, Tragedy

Peace. It is a providence, and no great change; we are only what we always were, but naked now.

Crucible, Naked, Peace, Providence

He's liked, but he's not well liked.

Liked, Salesman, Sarcastic, Wells

When today fails to offer the justification for hope, tomorrow becomes the only grail worth pursuing.

Hope, Memorable, Offer, Pursuing, Today, Tomorrow

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.

Abstraction, Agony, Men, Names, Part, Stranger

There might be a dragon with five legs in my house, but no one has ever seen it.

Dragon, Dragons, Five, House, Legs

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.

Followed, Heart, History, Kings, Men, Time

Work a lifetime to pay off a house You finally own it and there's nobody to live in it.

House, Lifetime, Live, Pay

Witch-hunts are always spooked by women's horrifying sexuality awakened by the superstud Devil.

Devil, Horrifying, Sexuality, Superstud, Witch

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.

Accepted, Fatalist, Principles, Result, Results

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