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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.

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
Many
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Necessity
Misconception
Tragedy
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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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We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!
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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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Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.
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You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit.
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When the guns roar, the arts die.
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I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.
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And yet one can't forever stand on the shore at some point, even if filled with indecision, skepticism, reservation and doubt, you either jump in or concede that life is forever elsewhere.
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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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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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It was not really possible to understand oneself, let alone another human being.
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The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.
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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.
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I figure I've done what I could do, more or less, and now I'm going back to being a chemical all we are is a lot of talking nitrogen, you know.
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Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.
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The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.
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A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
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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.
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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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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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