Arthur Miller

Controlled hysteria is what's required. To exist constantly in a state of controlled hysteria. It's agony. But everyone has agony. The difference is that I try to take my agony home and teach it to sing.

The word "now" is like a bomb through the window, and it ticks.

Amos Oz is one of the finest novelists of this entire period. MY MICHAEL is a beautiful work of great depth and in some indescribable way lingers in the mind as a lyric song to his country's people as much as a moving love story.

Just remember, kid, you can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that you gave away.

Oh,Elizabeth, your justice would freeze beer.

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.

Immortality is like trying to carve your initials in a block of ice in the middle of July.

PROCTOR--he knows it is insane: No, it is not the same! What others say and what i sign to is not the same!

It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not?

The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.

I am bewildered by the death of love. And my responsibility for it.

I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match.

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

I am older than everyone I ever knew. All my dogs are dead. Half a dozen cats, parakeets... all gone.

I regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.

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.

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

Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not.

A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.

I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play-but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.

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.