Arthur Miller Quotes

I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it.

I saw clearly only when I saw with love.

I may think of you softly from time to time. But I’ll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.

I like to keep abreast of my ignorance.

I know you’re no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.

I don’t know why it is, but every time I reach out for something I want, I have to pull back because other people will suffer.

I do not believe that any work of art can help but be diminished by its adherence at any cost to a political program, including its author’s, and not for any other reason than that there is no political program – any more than there is a theory of tragedy – which can encompass the complexities of real life.

I cannot sleep for dreamin’; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I’d find you comin’ through some door.

Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.

Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.

Everything we are is at every moment alive in us.

Everything influences playwrights. A playwright who isn’t influenced is never of any use. He’s 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.