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Current counts: Authors: 8,146. Quotations: 38,970
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| Arthur Miller
...like swimming in a sea of gumdrops.A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself.A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself. 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.All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen. Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appears to be
best in four thingsAn era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.Can anyone remember love? It's like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume. Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money. Few of us can surrender our belief that society must ... make sense. ...
that The State has lost its mind & is punishing so many innocent people is
intolerable. So the evidence has to be internally denied.He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act. I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match.I understand Willy Loman's longing for immortality Willy's writing his name in a cake of ice on a hot day, but he wishes he were writing in stone. I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem,
serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.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. If triangles had a God, He'd have three sides.
In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera. Like every writer, I am asked where my work
originates, and if I knew I would go there more
often to find more.
Look, we're all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house --in the bedroom he's asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room he's rolling around with some bareass girl, in the library he's paying his taxes, in the yard he's raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he's making a bomb to blow it all up.Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.My conception of the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind; and in this respect at least the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them. If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll
never get out of the jungle that way.Nobody dast blame this man. 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.That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker? 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. The job is to ask questions-it always was-and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility. 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. The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes. The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost. The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.The word now is like a bomb through the window, and it ticks.Those who flee temptation generally leave a forwarding address.Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise
but the absence of any need to choose this action?
Without alienation, there can be no politics.You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return. |
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