What I've Learned:Arthur Miller (1915 - 2005)

Esquire: Features: Arthur Miller (1915 - 2005): "When I was in Nevada, I lived about sixty miles out of Reno. There was a guy who had this house on stilts. In the desert. And that was a very curious thing, looking at this house raised up about ten feet above the ground. I wondered, Was he waiting for a flood? Well, it turned out he had a hole in the ground under that house, and there was a silver mine down at the bottom of this hole. He would periodically go down and dig himself out some silver. That was his bank. And I think that's like a writer. He's living on top of that hole. He goes down there and sees if he can chop out some silver.

I knew playwrights, young guys my age, who were simply not prepared to face the fact that their plays weren't any good. Mine weren't. I thought, Either I do this right or I'm gonna get out of it. I'm not gonna spend the rest of my life being a fool.

Some people should never get married. Not everyone has that combination of dependency. You're leaning on somebody, and the desire to support somebody else, it just doesn't exist in some people.

I could write about failure only because I could deal with it. Most of my work before Death of a Salesman, 98 percent of it was a failure. By the time Willy Loman came along, I knew how he felt.

Some failures are right. And some people fail because society isn't ready for them. That's what makes it so difficult.

You should read because it's a pleasure. Or go to the theater because it's a pleasure. That's what it's about, basically—even the pleasure of misery, if that happens to be the nature of the beast.

The only thing that I am reasonably sure of is that anybody who's got an ideology has stopped thinking.

I believe in work. If somebody doesn't create something, however small it may be, he gets sick. An awful lot of people feel that they're treading water—that if they vanished in smoke, it wouldn't mean anything at all in this world. And that's a despairing and destructive feeling. It'll kill you.

The more sex the better. It may be a good thing to get it out in the open. You turn on the television now and they're screwing on the television. That's part of life. Why hide it in a basement someplace and get a lot of gangsters to distribute it?

Politicians are us, which is very dangerous. If they weren't us, it would be a lot better.

We have never, in my opinion, met up with this kind of an administration, which is extremely intelligent and has terrific control over the political life of the country. They are representing the rich people in a way that I didn't think was so blatantly possible. It's almost sociopathic. As though, Okay, if you can make it, you're one of us; if you can't make it, too bad, Jack. Some of the monkeys fall off the tree.

To write any kind of imaginary work, you gotta fall on your sword. You gotta be ready to be blasted out of existence. Lots of times, the blood is on the floor. "