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

Arthur Miller

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Arthur Miller
Age: 89 †
Born: 1915
Born: October 17
Died: 2005
Died: February 10
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Arthur Asher Miller
Life
Forces
Jokes
Ignorance
Simulate
Free
Sensing
Force
Deadly
Play
Concealed
Writing
Irony
Made
Joke

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PROCTOR, his mind wild, breathless: I say--I say--God is dead!
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There is a kind of perverse unity forming among us, born, I think, of the discontent of all classes of people with the endless frustration of life.
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You specialize in something until one day it is specializing in you.
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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.
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Poor brain! How helplessly it dissolves when willing eyes meet and the nose warms to those old jungle scents.
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Be liked and you will never want.
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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.
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Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.
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A little man makes a mistake and they hang him by the thumbs the big ones become ambassadors.
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I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theatre, or the play - but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.
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Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.
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I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life.
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Life is an endless, truly endless struggle. There's no time when we're going to arrive at a plateau where the whole thing gets sorted. It's a struggle in the way every plant has to find it's own way to stand up straight. A lot of the time it's a failure. And yet it's not a failure if some enlightenment comes from it.
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Cleave to no faith when faith brings blood.
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There is unquestionably a contradiction between an efficient technological machine and the flowering of human nature, of the human personality.
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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.
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Controlled hysteria is what's required. To exist constantly in a state of controlled hysteria. It's agony. But everyone has agony. The difference is that I try to take my agony home and teach it to sing.
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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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The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
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A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse.
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