The trouble with literature is that writers have to be the ones who write it. It’s always partial, it’s always partisan, and it’s always incomplete. When I say that writers have to be the one to write it, I mean that in order to generate the energy to create a big novel, a big play, an involved poem, one has to be a species of fanatic. You have to to think that this is really the only thing worth doing. Otherwise, you can’t generate the intensity to do it well. And to that degree, by generating that intensity, you are blinding yourself to what does not fit into some preconceived pattern in your own mind. There’s no doubt about that to me, and I think that probably lay behind Plato’s prohibition of the artist in society. He was right in the sense that the artist doesn’t know what he’s doing, to some extent. That is, we pretend, or like to believe, that we are depicting the whole truth of some situation, when as a matter of fact, the whole truth is, by definition, made impossible by the fact that we are obsessed people.
– Arthur Miller, from an interview with Phillip Gelb for Educational Theatre Journal, October 1958