I’m a writer, and everything I write is both a confession and a struggle to understand things about myself and this world in which I live. This is what everyone’s work should be-whether you dance or paint or sing. It is a confession, a baring of your soul, your faults, those things you simply cannot or will not understand or accept. You stumble forward, confused, and you share. If you’re lucky, you learn something.

Arthur Miller

Categorized in : Writing Struggle Confused

I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.

Arthur Miller

jobs art thinking

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

Arthur Miller

regret mistake life

...When the government goes into the business of destroying trust, it goes into the business of destroying itself.

Arthur Miller

destroying liberty government

No one wants the truth if it is inconvenient.

Arthur Miller

honesty ifs want

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.

Arthur Miller

doubt life-is forever

The arts can do more to sustain the peace than all the wars, the armaments, and the threats and warnings of politicians.

Arthur Miller

politician war art

Work a lifetime to pay off a house You finally own it and there's nobody to live in it.

Arthur Miller

lifetime house pay

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.

Arthur Miller

eras exhausted dream

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.

Arthur Miller

causes challenges character

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.

Arthur Miller

editing home writing

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.

Arthur Miller

writing attitude fun

If you analyse anything, you destroy it.

Arthur Miller

ifs

Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.

Arthur Miller

money motivational thinking

When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die. ... No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion.

Arthur Miller

white men hands

Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.

Arthur Miller

liberty mind people

Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.

Arthur Miller

beautiful beauty heaven

Everything we are is at every moment alive in us.

Arthur Miller

alive moments

My plays are always involved with society, but I'm writing about people, too, and it's clear over the years that audiences understand them and care about them. The political landscape changes, the issues change, but the people are still there. People don't really change that much.

Arthur Miller

issues writing years

Those who formally rule take their signals and commands not from the electorate as a body, but from a small group of men. This group will be called the Establishment. It exists even though that existence is stoutly denied. It is one of the secrets of the American social order... A second secret is the fact that the existence of the Establishment - the ruling class - is not supposed to be discussed.

Arthur Miller

command-not men order

Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

Arthur Miller

betrayal heartbreak life