13 Arthur Miller Quotes on Work

Arthur Miller quotes on work

17. Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, 'What do you do?' And, being American, many's the time I've almost asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day.

19. You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.

34. If I have any justification for having lived it's simply, I'm nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There's some value in that.

40. 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.

41. I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of anything.

43. They don't need me in New York. I'm the New England man. I'm vital in New England.

44. I simply asked him if he was making any money. Is that a criticism?

53. The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that.

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

60. Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!

62. Nobody dast blame this man. Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. 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. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

63. And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. 'Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?

65. Nothing's Planted, I don't have a thing in the ground.