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Arthur Miller Quotes

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

"You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return."

"Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets."
Life

"What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all."

"Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?"

"You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you."

"All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen."

"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."

"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."

"I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act."

"I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult."

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

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

"The best of our theater is standing on tiptoe, striving to see over the shoulders of father and mother. The worst is exploiting and wallowing in the self-pity of adolescence and obsessive keyhole sexuality. The way out, as the poet says, is always through."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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