Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher Millerwas a prolific American playwright, essayist, and prominent figure in twentieth-century American theatre. Among his most popular plays are All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucibleand A View from the Bridge. He also wrote several screenplays and was most noted for his work on The Misfits. The drama Death of a Salesman is often numbered on the short list of finest American plays in the 20th century alongside Long Day's Journey into Night and A Streetcar...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth17 October 1915
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
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.
I couldn't have predicted that a work like 'Death of a Salesman' would take on the proportions it has
There is an open terror of the critics (in New York) and of losing fortunes of money
Marrying him was my mistake, not his. He couldn't give me the attention, warmth and affection I need. It's not in his nature. Arthur never credited me with much intelligence. He couldn't share his intellectual life with me. As bed partners, we were so-so.
All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.
A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that's what it's for!
We were eating out regularly, perhaps four to five nights a week. Now we're eating out twice.
You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.
He wants to live on through something-and in his case, his masterpiece is his son. all of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world.
As a writer, I've always believed that while my work and I myself are embedded in whatever period I am writing about, clearly I am sensitive to the winds that are blowing in the culture. At the same time, I have always felt that the issue was not to deal with the problem in the abstract, but to deal with the people who are in that problem. The emphasis is on the people. The general problem begins to resolve itself even before the play is finished.
In a dream, we are simply confronted with various loaded symbols, and where one is exhausted, it gives way to another.
Theater is a very changeable art. It responds to the moment in history the way the newspaper does, and there's no predicting what to come up with next.
The two greatest plays ever written were Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, and they're both about father-son relationships.
There is a problem on the so-called commercial stage in New York. The price of a ticket is exorbitant, and there are no longer original productions possible, apparently, on the commercial stage. They are all plays that were taken from either England or smaller theaters, off-Broadway theaters, and so on. The one justification there used to be for the commercial theater was that it originated everything we had, and now it originates nothing. But the powers that be seem perfectly content to have it that way. They don't risk anything anymore, and they simply pick off the cream.