The artist is the outcast; he always will be. He is an outcast in the sense that he is to one side of the stream of life and absorbs it and is, in some part of himself, reserved from its implications…I think you can’t see a thing when you’re in the middle of it. To some extent, an artist has to step to one side of what’s happening, divorce himself from his role as a citizen, and in that sense he becomes the enemy because he does not carry forth in himself and believe what is being believed around him. He is the enemy, usually, I suppose, of the way things are, whatever way they are.
– Arthur Miller, from an interview with Phillip Gelb for Educational Theatre Journal, October 1958