14 Arthur Miller Quotes on Art

Arthur Miller quotes on art

2. I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.

5. 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.

6. By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.

7. I cannot write anything that I understand too well. If I know what something means to me, if I have already come to the end of it as an experience, I can't write it because it seems a twice-told tale. I have to astonish myself, and that of course is a very costly way of going about things, because you can go up a dead end and discover that it's beyond your capacity to discover some organism underneath your feeling, and you're left simply with a formless feeling which is not itself art. Its inexpressible and one must leave it until it is hardened and becomes something that has form and has some possibility of being communicated. It might take a year or two or three or four to emerge.

10. The best of our theater is standing on tiptoe, striving to see over the shoulders of father and mother. The worst is exploiting and wallowing in the self-pity of adolescence and obsessive keyhole sexuality. The way out, as the poet says, is always through.

16. A playwright ... is ... the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great.

24. The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.

25. The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down:. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality.

28. A playwright lives in an occupied country: And if you can't live that way you don't stay.

33. I was very moved by that play once again when the Royal Shakespeare Company did a production that toured the cathedrals of England. Then they took it to Poland and performed it in the cathedrals there, too. The actors said it changed their lives. Officials wept; they were speechless after the play, and everyone knew why. It was because they had to enforce the kind of repression the play was attacking. That made me prouder than anything I ever did in my life. The mission of the theater, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.

36. I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

107. His work teaches us a lot about how to fight evil.

108. Arthur was the last of the three great theatrical voices of the American century - O'Neill, Williams, Miller. ... Arthur's special achievement was to make political and social plays which belonged on Broadway and yet were also powered to reach out into America and way beyond.

109. The greatest playwright of the 20th century.