102 quotes
The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
There are wheels within wheels in this village, and fires within fires!
The Crucible (1953)
I am bewildered by the death of love. And my responsibility for it.
After the Fall (1964)
Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
The Ride Down Mount Morgan (1991)
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.
Commenting on After the Fall (1964)
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.
He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.
Death of a Salesman (1949)
The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.
Collected Plays (1958)
By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man.
Collected Plays (1958)
A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance — you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.
The mission of the theater, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.
The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.
Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.
Without alienation, there can be no politics.
I see your point, but can you name one classical Greek or Elizabethean shoemaker?
You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.
The Price (1967)
An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.
A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.
Death of a Salesman (1949)
I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match.
The Ride Down Mount Morgan (1991)