9 Arthur Miller Quotes on Writing

Arthur Miller quotes on writing

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.

15. Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

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.

27. If I see an ending, I can work backward.

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

29. Well, all the plays that I was trying to write : were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.

70. Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect. No tragedy can therefore come about when its author fears to question absolutely everything, when he regards any institution, habit or custom as being either everlasting, immutable or inevitable. In the tragic view the need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star, and whatever it is that hedges his nature and lowers it is ripe for attack and examination.

106. I write about private dilemmas that have become public calamities.

110. Writing meant, for him, an effort to locate in the human species a counterforce to the randomness of victimisation.