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A Play's An Interpretation. It Is Not A Report. And That Is The Beginning Of Its Poetry Because, In Order To Interpret, You Have To Distort Toward A Symbolic Construction Of What Happened, And As That Distortion Takes Place, You Begin To Leave Out And Overemphasize And Consequently Deliver Up Life As A Unity Rather Than As A Chaos, And Any Such Attempt, The More Intense It Is, The More Poetic It Becomes.

-Arthur Miller

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A Play's An Interpretation.

Arthur Miller

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A Play's An Interpretation. It Is Not A Report. And That Is The Beginning Of Its Poetry Because, In Order To Interpret, You Have To Distort Toward A Symbolic Construction Of What Happened, And As That Distortion Takes Place, You Begin To Leave Out And Overemphasize And Consequently Deliver Up Life As A Unity Rather Than As A Chaos, And Any Such Attempt, The More Intense It Is, The More Poetic It Becomes.

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The Word "now" Is Like A Bomb Through The Window, And It Ticks.

The Camera Has Its Own Kind Of Consciousness; In The Lens The Garden Of Eden Itself Would Become Ever So Slightly Too Perfect.

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.

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Everything We Are Is At Every Moment Alive In Us.

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Serious Business

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Quotation Marks

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Because It Is My Name! Because I Cannot Have Another In My Life! Because I Lie And Sign Myself To Lies! Because I Am Not Worth The Dust On The Feet Of Them That Hang! How May I Live Without My Name? I Have Given You My Soul; Leave Me My Name!

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The Apple Cannot Be Stuck Back On The Tree Of Knowledge; Once We Begin To See, We Are Doomed And Challenged To Seek The Strength To See More, Not Less.

The American Dream Is The Largely Unacknowledged Screen In Front Of Which All American Writing Plays Itself Out.

Great Drama Is Great Questions Or It Is Nothing But Technique. I Could Not Imagine A Theater Worth My Time That Did Not Want To Change The World.

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Let Either Of You Breathe A Word, Or The Edge Of A Word, About The Other Things, And I Will Come To You In The Black Of Some Terrible Night And I Will Bring A Pointy Reckoning That Will Shudder You. And You Know I Can Do It; I Saw Indians Smash My Dear Parents' Heads On The Pillow Next To Mine, And I Have Seen Some Reddish Work Done At Night, And I Can Make You Wish You Had Never Seen The Sun Go Down! - Abigail

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Today, [theatre's] More Likely To Be Consciously Not Aimed At The Public, But At A More Sophisticated Or Educated Public. . . . The Result Is That Some Of The Sheer Humanity Has Leaked Out Of The Enterprise.

What Work You Do! It's Strange Work For A Christian Girl To Hang Old Women!

He's Not The Finest Character That Ever Lived. But He's A Human Being, And A Terrible Thing Is Happening To Him. So Attention Must Be Paid.

You Specialize In Something Until One Day It Is Specializing In You.

A Genuine Invention In The Realm Of Ideas Must First Emerge As An Abstruse And Even Partial Concept? At First Blusha New Idea Appearstobe Verycloseto Insanity Because To Be New It Must Reverse Important Basic Beliefs And Assumptions Which, In Turn, Have Been Institutionalized And Are Administered By One Or Another Kind Of Priesthood With A Vested Interest In An Old Idea.

The Closer A Man Approaches Tragedy The More Intense Is His Concentration Of Emotion Upon The Fixed Point Of His Commitment, Which Is To Say The Closer He Approaches What In Life We Call Fanaticism.

I'm Sure There Are Writers Who Are Great Businessmen, But I Never Met Any.

The Greeks Used To Use The Same Stories, The Same Mythology, Time After Time, Different Authors. There Was No Premium Placed Upon An Original Story, And Indeed, Shakespeare Likewise. A Lot Of People Wrote Plays About Great Kings. They Didn't Expect A Brand-new Story. It Was What That New Author Made Of The Old Story. It Is Probably The Same Now. We Disguise It By Inventing What Seem To Be New Stories, But They're Basically The Same Story Anyway.

Don't Take It On Yourself. Forget Now. Live.

God Really Does Take Our Work Seriously: It Is Wrong, It Is A Sin, To Accept Or Remain In A Position That You Know Is A Mismatch For You. Perhaps That's A Form Of Sin You've Never Considered - The Sin Of Staying In The Wrong Job. But God Did Not Place You On The Earth To Waste Away Your Years In Labor That Does Not Employ His Design Or Purpose For Your Life, No Matter How Much You May Be Getting Paid For It.

What Is The Most Innocent Place In Any Country? Is It Not The Insane Asylum? These People Drift Through Life Truly Innocent, Unable To See Into Themselves At All.

I Don't Know A Critic Who Penetrates The Center Of Anything.

Success, Instead Of Giving Freedom Of Choice, Becomes A Way Of Life. There's No Country I've Been To Where People, When You Come Into A Room And Sit Down With Them, So Often Ask You, "what Do You Do?" And, Being American, Many's The Time I've Almost Asked That Question, Then Realized It's Good For My Soul Not To Know. For A While! Just To Let The Evening Wear On And See What I Think Of This Person Without Knowing What He Does And How Successful He Is, Or What A Failure. We're Ranking Everybody Every Minute Of The Day.

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.

The Jungle Is Dark But Full Of Diamonds, Willy.

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.

Charley: He Won't Starve. None A Them Starve. Forget About Him. Willy: Then What Have I Got To Remember?

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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.

The Parochial Snobbery Of These People Was Partly Responsible For Their Failure To Convert The Indians. Probably They Also Preferred To Take Land From Heathens Rather Than From Fellow Christians. At Any Rate, Very Few Indians Were Converted, And The Salem Folk Believed That The Virgin Forest Was The Devil's Last Preserve, His Home Base And The Citadel Of His Final Stand. To The Best Of Their Knowledge The American Forest Was The Last Place On Earth That Was Not Paying Homage To God.

The Writer Must Be In It; He Can't Be To One Side Of It, Ever. He Has To Be Endangered By It. His Own Attitudes Have To Be Tested In It. The Best Work That Anybody Ever Writes Is The Work That Is On The Verge Of Embarrassing Himself, Always.

The Task Of The Real Intellectual Consists Of Analyzing Illusions In Order To Discover Their Causes.

I Think It's A Mistake To Ever Look For Hope Outside Of One's Self.

I Came Out Of A Culture In Which My Uncle, My Father - They Were All Salesmen Of One Kind Or Another. My Father Was A Manufacturer. He Also, In Effect, Had To Sell That Stuff. And If He Didn't Literally Do It, His Men Did. So, Selling Was In The Air Through My Boyhood. The Whole Idea Of Successfully Selling Was Very Important.

I'm The End Of The Line; Absurd And Appalling As It May Seem, Serious New York Theater Has Died In My Lifetime.

... Vulgarity Has No Nation.

I Believe In Work. If Somebody Doesn't Create Something, However Small It May Be, He Gets Sick. An Awful Lot Of People Feel That They're Treading Water -- That If They Vanished In Smoke, It Wouldn't Mean Anything At All In This World. And That's A Despairing And Destructive Feeling. It'll Kill You.

Everybody Likes A Kidder, But Nobody Lends Him Money.

The Car, The Furniture, The Wife, The Children - Everything Has To Be Disposable. Because You See The Main Thing Today Is - Shopping.

...when The Government Goes Into The Business Of Destroying Trust, It Goes Into The Business Of Destroying Itself.

They Know Your Name, Address, Telephone Number, Credit Card Numbers, Who Else Is Driving The Car "for Insurance", ... Your Driver's License Number. In The State Of Massachusetts, This Is The Same Number As That Used For Social Security, Unless You Object To Such Use. In That Case, You Are Assigned A Number And You Reside Forever More On The List Of "weird People Who Don't Give Out Their Social Security Number In Massachusetts."

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.

Witch-hunts Are Always Spooked By Women's Horrifying Sexuality Awakened By The Superstud Devil.

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.

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.

You Can't Eat The Orange And Throw The Peel Away - A Man Is Not A Piece Of Fruit.

The Two Greatest Plays Ever Written Were Hamlet And Oedipus Rex, And They're Both About Father-son Relationships.

A Play's An Interpretation. It Is Not A Report. And That Is The Beginning Of Its Poetry Because, In Order To Interpret, You Have To Distort Toward A Symbolic Construction Of What Happened, And As That Distortion Takes Place, You Begin To Leave Out And Overemphasize And Consequently Deliver Up Life As A Unity Rather Than As A Chaos, And Any Such Attempt, The More Intense It Is, The More Poetic It Becomes.

A Suicide Kills Two People, That's What It's For!

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