Arthur Miller

What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.

Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?

The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.

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.

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.

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
- All from Arthur Miller, 1915 - 2005

About: Arthur Asher Miller was born at New York City on this day in 1915. He attended public school in Harlem, his applications to Cornell and the University of Michigan were declined. He read extensively and saved most of his earnings for five years and was then accepted at Michigan where he earned his BA in English in 1938 and was later given an honorary doctorate. He wrote his first play in his sophomore year, motivated by a $250 contest prize. His 1949 play Death of a Salesman won a Pulitzer, three Tony Awards, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the first play to win all three. During the Red Scare of the fifties he was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was blackballed in Hollywood. Miller continued to write until his final illness, his 25th play, Finishing the Picture, was released in 2004.