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The tragic right is a condition of life, a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself. The wrong is the condition which suppresses man, perverts the flowing out of his love and creative instinct. Tragedy enlightens - and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies.

Tragedy and the Common Man - 1949, The New York Times - 27 February 1949

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

Quoted in "Cold War Ghosts" by Victor Navasky in The Nation - 16 July 2001

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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.

Collected Plays - 1958, Introduction, Section 1

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

Quoted in Finding Your Bipolar Muse : How to Master Depressive Droughts and Manic Depression - 2006 by Lana R. Castle

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I'm a fatalist. I consider I am rejected in principle. My work is, and, through my work, I am. If it's accepted, it's miraculous or the result of a misunderstanding.

Quoted in "Arthur Miller, Moral Voice of American Stage, Dies at 89" by Marilyn Berger in The New York Times - 11 February 2005

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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.

The New York Herald Tribune - 31 March 1954

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I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of anything.

Quoted in "Arthur Miller, Moral Voice of American Stage, Dies at 89" by Marilyn Berger in The New York Times - 11 February 2005

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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.

On Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman - quoted in The New York Times - 9 May 1984

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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. Even the dictionary says nothing more about the word than that it means a story with a sad or unhappy ending. This impression is so firmly fixed that I almost hesitate to claim that in truth tragedy implies more optimism in its author than does comedy, and that its final result ought to be the reinforcement of the onlooker's brightest opinions of the human animal. For, if it is true to say that in essence the tragic hero is intent upon claiming his whole due as a personality, and if this struggle must be total and without reservation, then it automatically demonstrates the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity.

Tragedy and the Common Man - 1949, The New York Times - 27 February 1949

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I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing — his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his "rightful" position in his society. Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks t attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.

Tragedy and the Common Man - 1949, The New York Times - 27 February 1949

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