Top 280 Arthur Miller Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “But then, it’s what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, I’m lonely.”

— Arthur Miller

252. “To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off.”

— Arthur Miller

253. “A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from.”

— Arthur Miller

254. “I’m one-dollar an hour, Willy! I tried seven states and couldn’t raise it. A buck an hour! Do you gather my meaning? I’m not bringing home any prizes anymore and you’re going to stop waiting for me to bring them home!”

— Arthur Miller

255. “That is a very good question. I don’t know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?”

— Arthur Miller

256. “The car, the furniture, the wife, the children – everything has to be disposable. Because you see the main thing today is – shopping.”

— Arthur Miller

257. “A fart on Thomas Putnam.”

— Arthur Miller

258. “You want somethin’ else, Eddie, and you can never have her!”

— Arthur Miller

259. “You cant get very far in this world without your dossier being there first.”

— Arthur Miller

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

260. “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.”

— Arthur Miller

261. “Amos Oz is one of the finest novelists of this entire period. MY MICHAEL is a beautiful work of great depth and in some indescribable way lingers in the mind as a lyric song to his country’s people as much as a moving love story.”

— Arthur Miller

Featured in: Country Quotes

262. “I’m the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.”

— Arthur Miller

263. “How can they whip cheese?”

— Arthur Miller

264. “MARCHAND, leaning forward to see Monceau: You would think, though, that with the manpower shortage they’d economize on personnel. In the car that stopped me there was a driver, two French detectives, and a German official of some kind. They could easily have put a notice in the paper – everyone would have come here to present his documents. This way it’s a whole morning wasted. Aside from the embarrassment. LEBEAU: I’m not embarrassed, I’m scared to death. To Bayard: You embarrassed?”

— Arthur Miller

265. “It occurs to me that with all the television people watch, most of their acquaintances are actors.”

— Arthur Miller

266. “How to live had started out as an analytical problem of how to place himself so as to intercept the flow of money in the society.”

— Arthur Miller

267. “Forget now. Live.”

— Arthur Miller

268. “I have seen you looking up, burning in your loneliness.”

— Arthur Miller

269. “Pontius Pilate! God will not let you clean your hands of this!”

— Arthur Miller

270. “LINDA: To me you are. Slight pause. The handsomest. From the darkness is heard the laughter of a woman. Willy doesn’t turn to it, but it continues through Linda’s lines.”

— Arthur Miller

271. “The paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl around a grain of fact.”

— Arthur Miller

272. “Now we shall touch the bottom of this swamp.”

— Arthur Miller

273. “LINDA: I know, dear, I know. But he likes to have a letter. Just to know that there’s still a possibility for better things.”

— Arthur Miller

274. “The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him. Always. Its inevitable. The way he puts himself on the line. Sometimes quite secretly. Sometimes symbolically.”

— Arthur Miller

275. “All organisation is and must be grounded on the idea of exclusion and prohibition just as two objects cannot occupy the same space.”

— Arthur Miller

276. “God sees my name; God knows how black my sins are!”

— Arthur Miller

277. “Her soul, her soul seems flown away. She sleeps and yet she walks...”

— Arthur Miller

278. “The Devil, as Reverend Hale said, is a wily one, and, until an hour before he fell, even God thought him beautiful in Heaven.”

— Arthur Miller

279. “BAYARD: My friend, without the Red Army standing up to them right now you could forget France for a thousand years! LEDUC: I agree. But that does not require an understanding of political and economic forces – it is simply faith in the Red Army.”

— Arthur Miller

280. “Art is long, life is short. I forgot the Latin.”

— Arthur Miller

281. “The jails are full of fearless characters.”

— Arthur Miller

282. “Pop! I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you!”

— Arthur Miller

283. “MONCEAU: It was an absolutely idiotic accident. I was rooming with another actor, a gentile. And he kept warning me to get out. But naturally one doesn’t just give up a role like that. But one night I let myself be influenced by him. He pointed out that I had a number of books which were on the forbidden list – of Communist literature – I mean things like Sinclair Lewis, and Thomas Mann, and even a few things by Friedrich Engels, which everybody was reading at one time.”

— Arthur Miller

284. “The past is holy. Why? Not merely because the present contains the past, but because a moral world depends on an acceptance of the notion of causality, on an acknowledgment that we are responsible for, and a product of, our actions.”

— Arthur Miller

285. “Good. Then her saintliness is done with. We will slide together into our pit.”

— Arthur Miller

286. “But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”

— Arthur Miller

287. “From the beginning writing meant freedom, a spreading of wings. I had never known such exhiliration. It was as though I had levitated and left the world below.”

— Arthur Miller

288. “He wants, beyond anything, to be “well liked”, for, without that, he fears he will be nothing at all.”

— Arthur Miller

289. “Why must everybody conquer the world?”

— Arthur Miller

290. “You wouldn’t have any idea what’s going on, would you? BAYARD, shaking his head: I was walking down the street. LEBEAU: Me too. Something told me – Don’t go outside today. So I went out. Weeks go by and I don’t open my door. Today I go out. And I had no reason, I wasn’t even going anywhere. Looks left and right to the others. To Bayard: They get picked up the same way?”

— Arthur Miller

291. “The way I saw tragedy, I guess I still do, is a forward motion on the part of a character. He is in search of a value which he is committed to, to the point of his life.”

— Arthur Miller