Frasi di Arthur Miller

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“[su Marilyn Monroe] Con l'eventuale eccezione di L'amato (Chéri, 1920) di Colette, e di qualche altra breve storia… non mi risulta che abbia letto alcunché in tutta la vita. Non ne sentiva la necessità: credeva di poter afferrare l'idea di un libro… in poche pagine… Priva di qualunque pretesa culturale, non provò mai il bisogno di preoccuparsi di cose che non la travolgessero.”

“Credo che noi in America siamo arrivati alla fine di uno sviluppo, perché ci ripetiamo un anno dopo l'altro, benché nessuno sembri accorgersene.”

“Se attualmente siamo incapaci di distinguere fra un soggetto elevato e uno vile, fra una visione ampia e una relativamente ristretta, restiamo del tutto abbandonati agli affetti toccati…”

“[su Marilyn Monroe] La inquadravano di spalle per mettere in evidenza la rotazione delle anche, un movimento così fluido da apparire comico. In realtà era la sua camminata naturale.”

“[Su Marilyn] Risplende di bellezza, di umanità. È il genere di artista che non va in scena ogni santo giorno che viene. Dopotutto, è una creatura fuori dall'ordinario.”

“[Su Marilyn Monroe] È la donna più donna che si possa immaginare. La maggior parte degli uomini esprime al meglio la propria mascolinità accanto a lei… è una sorta di calamita che fa emergere gli istinti primordiali dell'animale maschio.”

“Ricordati, ragazzo, puoi recuperare più velocemente un milione di dollari rubati che una parola che hai detto.”

“In an ordinary crime, how does one defend the accused? One calls up witnesses to prove his innocence. But witchcraft is ipso facto, on its face and by its nature, an invisible crime, is it not? Therefore, who may possibly be witness to it? The witch and the victim. None other. Now we cannot hope the witch will accuse herself; granted? Therefore, we must rely upon her victims — and they do testify, the children certainly do testify. As for the witches, none will deny that we are most eager for all their confessions. Therefore, what is left for a lawyer to bring out? I think I have made my point. Have I not?”

“I do think I see some shred of goodness in John Proctor. Not enough to weave a banner with, but white enough to keep it from such dogs. Give them no tear! Tears pleasure them! Show honor now, show a stony heart and sink them with it!”

“A playwright lives in an occupied country… And if you can't live that way you don't stay.”

“I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play — but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.”

“I simply asked him if he was making any money. Is that a criticism?”

“They don't need me in New York. I'm the New England man. I'm vital in New England.”

“Spite, spite, is the word of your undoing!”

“Nothing's Planted, I don't have a thing in the ground.”

“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.”

“The job is to ask questions — it always was — and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.”

“I'm very well liked in Hartford. You know, the trouble is, Linda, people don't seem to take to me.”

“The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.”

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

“Look, we're all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house — in the bedroom he's asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room he's rolling around with some bareass girl, in the library he's paying his taxes, in the yard he's raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he's making a bomb to blow it all up.”

“And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. 'Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?”

“Now hell and heaven grapple on our backs and all our old pretense is ripped away. Aye, and God's icy wind will blow.”

“We're free and clear, Willy. We're free, we're free, we're free…”

“You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.”

“Hale: Here is all the invisible world, caught, defined, and calculated. In these books the Devil stands stripped of all his brute disguises. Here are all your familiar spirits — your incubi and succubi; your witches that go by land, by air, and by sea; your wizards of the night and of the day. Have no fear now — we shall find him out if he has come among us, and I mean to crush him utterly if he has shown his face!
Rebecca: Will it hurt the child, sir?
Hale: I cannot tell. If she is truly in the Devil's grip we may have to rip and tear to get her free.”

“I like it not that Mr. Parris should lay his hand upon my baby. I see no light of God in that man. I'll not conceal it.”

“When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die. … No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion.”

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

“Well, all the plays that I was trying to write … were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.”

“The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.”

“Sit down, Willy.”

“Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.”