Screenwriters From The United States

"Have you ever seen the guy who's got the record for "Fattest Man in the World"? It's an amazing thing: Bob Hughes, 1,400 pounds. Ladies and gentlemen, the man has let himself go! I used to even feel bad, y'know, talkin' about him onstage, 'cause, y'know, somebody-- you could be-- but you could weigh 1,000 pounds and go "He's not talkin' about me." "This is a man with a serious weight problem.""

"My favorite sign: you pull up to the light, and it says "Left Turn Okay". Don't you like that one? A little personal touch! It's like they're sayin' to you "Left Turn? Okay..." "We're not crazy about you makin' the left. It's okay..." Pretty much: "Make it. Get it over with." [...] They should get more involved, with signs like "Right Turn? Why Not?" "U Turn? Enjoy It!""

"I was in Switzerland one time. Beautiful country! Great country. And interesting: 500 years without a war! Very impressive. Also very lucky for the Swiss Army! I don't know if you've ever seen that little Swiss Army knife? It's not much of a weapon! [...] If somebody attacks you, what do you pull out? Your nail clippers? "C'mon, buddy! Let's go!" "You get past me, the guy in back of me's got a spoon!""

"That is the feeling of life: you've got to go, all the time. You get to your job, what is your first thought? "I want to get home." But you get home, you feel cooped up; you've got to get out. You're out, it's late; you've got to get back. Wherever you are, you've got to get the hell out of there!"

"Stand-up is what I am."

"That's the greatest thing about comedy. If you've got talent, it's unmistakable. No one misses it and you don't have to wait around for a break."

"I like jokes and laughing more than anything. Everybody has an appetite for a different thing. And comedy is something that I have an endless appetite for."

"Who weeps for these, weeps for corruption!"

"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!"

"Danforth: Do you mean to deny this confession when you are free? Proctor: I mean to deny nothing! Danforth: Then explain to me, Mr. Proctor, why you will not let — Proctor: [With the cry of his whole soul] Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!"

"John, I counted myself so plain, so poorly made, no honest love could come to me! Suspicion kissed you when I did; I never knew how I should say my love. It were a cold house I kept!"

"It is mistaken law that leads you to sacrifice. Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it. I beg you, woman, prevail upon your husband to confess. Let him give his lie. Quail not before God's judgment in this, for it may well be God damns a liar less than he that throws his life away for pride."

"You're pulling heaven down, and raising up a whore!"

"A fire, a fire is burning! I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! And it is my face, and yours, Danforth! For them that quail to bring men out of ignorance, as I have quailed, and as you quail now when you know in all your black hearts that this be fraud — God damns our kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together!"

"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?"

"Hale: There is a prodigious fear of this court in the country — Danforth: Then there is a prodigious guilt in the country. Are you afraid to be questioned here? Hale: I may only fear the Lord, sir, but there is fear in the country nevertheless. Danforth: Reproach me not with the fear in the country; there is fear in the country because there is a moving plot to topple Christ in the country! Hale: But it does not follow that everyone accused is part of it. Danforth: No uncorrupted man may fear this court, Mr. Hale!"

"I have come across several articles by the American playwright Arthur Miller in which he sets out to denounce Stalin's purges and Brezhnev's invasion of Czechoslovakia but ends up denouncing America. Living in America, Arthur Miller wrote all the plays he wanted to write, had them produced, and was amply rewarded by money and fame. He also managed to have everything his heart desired, including the most fabulous blonde of his day. Why then this loathing for America? The only explanation I can think of is that Miller is too self-righteous and self-important to admit the gross stupidity of his Stalinist commitment. He must go on trying to convince the world that there is not much to choose between Russia and America."

"We burn a hot fire here; it melts down all concealment."

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

"Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God's fingers? I'll tell you what's walking Salem — vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law! This warrant's vengeance! I'll not give my wife to vengeance!"

"Though our own hearts break, we cannot flinch; these are new times, sir. There is a misty plot afoot so subtle we should be criminal to cling to old respect and ancient friendships. I have seen too many frightful proofs in court — the Devil is alive in Salem, and we dare not quail to follow wherever the accusing finger points!"

"Writing meant, for him, an effort to locate in the human species a counterforce to the randomness of victimisation."

"In Arthur Miller's writing, which counts on an effect of flatness that is to be found in most of our well-made fiction in this period, the question is used for a kind of sonority, a reverberation of consciousness that actually demands more consciousness and more language. After the inarticulateness of most of his people, we feel relief when a man breaks through and cries to another man: Don't you live in the world? What the hell are you?...What must I do to you?"

"The comparison with Reginald Rose is more than a passing snub, for it actually makes reference to an enduring affinity between Miller and the sturdy, footling craftsmen of "liberal" telly. Stripped of its tricks, and with the soliloquies cut, and so on, After the Fall shrinks to its proper proportion, as a sequence of sketches for The Defenders and The Eleventh Hour."

"Arthur Miller has always been the owner of a sound, but essentially minor, talent and no amount of purgation can improve the quality of whatever there may be to follow. As it is, however, those qualities which he has, substantial as they are, always seem to overreach themselves, straining after a magnitude for which they are simply not fitted. And in the few years that he has been away, on Sinai it would seem, Miller has developed an absurd literary hubris, puffing himself up like an idiotic bull-frog in Aesop."

"A person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is a sharp time, now, a precise time — we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world."

"The greatest playwright of the 20th century."

"Arthur was the last of the three great theatrical voices of the American century — O'Neill, Williams, Miller. … Arthur's special achievement was to make political and social plays which belonged on Broadway and yet were also powered to reach out into America and way beyond."

"His work teaches us a lot about how to fight evil."

"I remember reading “Death of a Salesman” in high school and hating it, but when I read it in college I loved it. I was blown away by what Arthur Miller had created."

"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."

"Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets."

"I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match."

"I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self. One day the house smells of fresh bread, the next of smoke and blood. One day you faint because the gardener cuts his finger off, within a week you're climbing over corpses of children bombed in a subway. What hope can there be if that is so? I tried to die near the end of the war. The same dream returned each night until I dared not to go to sleep and grew quite ill. I dreamed I had a child, and even in the dream I saw it was my life, and it was an idiot, and I ran away. But it always crept onto my lap again, clutched at my clothes. Until I thought, if I could kiss it, whatever in it was my own, perhaps I could sleep. And I bent to its broken face, and it was horrible … but I kissed it. I think one must finally take one's life in one's arms."

"I saw clearly only when I saw with love. Or can one ever remember love? It's like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume. And that's the truth of roses, isn't it? — The perfume?"

"I am bewildered by the death of love. And my responsibility for it."

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

"He have his goodness now, God forbid I take it from him!"

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

"Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value."

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

"I'm a fatalist. … I consider I am rejected in principle. My work is and, through my work, I am. If it's accepted, it's miraculous or the result of a misunderstanding."

"I see your point, but can you name one classical Greek or Elizabethean shoemaker?"

"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."

"That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?"

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

"Without alienation, there can be no politics."

"If I have any justification for having lived it's simply, I'm nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There's some value in that."

"I was very moved by that play once again when the Royal Shakespeare Company did a production that toured the cathedrals of England. Then they took it to Poland and performed it in the cathedrals there, too. The actors said it changed their lives. Officials wept; they were speechless after the play, and everyone knew why. It was because they had to enforce the kind of repression the play was attacking. That made me prouder than anything I ever did in my life. The mission of the theater, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities."

"The Crucible became by far my most frequently produced play, both abroad and at home. Its meaning is somewhat different in different places and moments. I can almost tell what the political situation in a country is when the play is suddenly a hit there — it is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past."