Arthur Miller

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

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

It matters not at all whether a modern play concerns itself with a grocer or a president if the intensity of the hero’s commitment to his course is less than the maximum possible. it matters not at all whether the hero falls from a great height or a small one, whether he is highly conscious or only dimly aware of what’s happening, whether his pride brings the fall or an unseen pattern written behind the clouds; if the intensity, the human passion to surpass his given bounds, the fanatic insistence upon his self-conceived role–if these are not present there can only be an outline of tragedy, but no living thing.

– Arthur Miller, from the introduction to his Collected Plays