Arthur Miller

I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing—his sense of personal dignity.

An almost imperceptible, but nevertheless decisive, shift of emphasis has been occurring in the past two decades in the tragic literature of the world. The shift is away from the hero who is a victim of fate, and toward the hero who is a victim of society.

The structure of a play is always the story of how the human spirit is tested.

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of being not quite good enough.

The world is an oyster, but you don't crack it open on a mattress!

Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.

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 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.

We are what we are because we have been what we have been.

The problem of the individual in relation to society is the central problem of our time.

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.

I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were.

The world is not a courtroom. The world is a market.

The best plays are about people who are trying to get something, and they don't get it.

The job of the artist is to remind people of what they have forgotten.

The human condition is that we are all in the same boat, and we are all going to sink.

The very word 'truth' has been so abused that it has lost its meaning.

The more I live, the more I am convinced that the only thing that matters is love.

The only thing that is constant is change.

The world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players.