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Whoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story. People elsewhere tend to accept, to a far greater degree anyway, that the conditions of life are hostile to mans pretensions.

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
Greater
Anyway
Ironical
People
Story
Degree
Pretensions
American
Using
Mans
United
Tend
Pretension
Dream
Degrees
Pole
Stories
Accept
Hostile
States
Conditions
Elsewhere
Writing
Accepting
Whoever

More quotes by Arthur Miller

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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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There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck in review after review, and in many conversations with writers and readers alike. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism.
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Without alienation, there can be no politics.
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The need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star.
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The mission of the theatre, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.
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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.
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Cleave to no faith when faith brings blood.
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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.
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Nevertheless, one learned very early that books had to be respected they were all putative Bibles and to some small degree had a share in holiness.
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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.
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People do look to others for some leadership, and it's not bad for them to supply it when they feel that way.
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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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A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.
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A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
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THE PRICE grew out of a need to reconfirm the power of the past, the seedbed of current reality, and the way to possibly reaffirm cause and effect in an insane world.
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The car, the furniture, the wife, the children - everything has to be disposable. Because you see the main thing today is - shopping.
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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.
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The jungle is dark but full of diamonds, Willy.
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Willie was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to life?. 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.
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Now hell and heaven grapple on our backs and all our old pretense is ripped away. Aye, and God's icy wind will blow.
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