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
A friend of mine once said that there were only two truly national events in the history of the United States. One was the Civil War and the other one was the Depression.
A suicide kills two people . . . that's what it's for.
Great stones they lay upon his chest until he plead aye or nay. They say he give them but two words. "More weight," he says. And died.
Suicide kills two people.
Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.
I would be twenty before I learned how to be fifteen, thirty before I knew what it meant to be twenty, and now at seventy-two I have to stop myself from thinking like a man of fifty who has plenty of time ahead.
Now we settle for half and I like it better.
Now we're eating pizza as opposed to steak.
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.
Playwriting is an oral art; it's not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard.