Arthur Miller Quotes

Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.

After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.

I've been outta my mind a long time.

I am furious at all the letters to answer, when all I want to do is think and write poems. ... I long for open time, with no obligations except toward the inner world and what is going on there.

A poet has to adapt himself, more or less consciously,to the demands of his vocation, and hence the peculiarities of poets and the condition of inspiration which many people have said is near to madness... The problem of creative writing is essentially one of concentration... a focusing of the attention in a special way.

The madness is there, and will always be there. But it will keep sleeping, as long as I don't wake it up.

Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.

I can honestly say [that writing] is the best life there is, because you get to live within the realm of your own mind, and that is a profoundly rare human privilege.

Lots of people say if you dredge too much stuff up, you'll go crazy - "You'll go insane!" But for a comedian, insanity is not a problem. It's a goal.

Let's get this started, people. It won't be long before we all lose our minds.

Writing was my real life and I was more at home with the people of my imagination than with the best I met in the objective world.

In my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one. Just as the past Lingers in the present, all my writings after night, including those that deal with biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic themes, profoundly bear it's stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read this very first of my works. Why did I write it? Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of the madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind?

Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.

Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I've always found the second approach the more pleasing.

I have a plan-to go mad.

Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.

What I really like to do is to sit quietly and write. All that other stuff is a problem. Publication to reception to negotiation to... everything, it's a problem. And I like to sit outside for long periods of time and just be in the tranquility of nature. That's what I like.

I got into my usual obsessive writing frenzy, using all the material I'd worked on for so long and crafting it into a little novel [Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries].

People are born with the knack to write poems and songs. I'm not a poet at all.

The man is either crazy or he is a poet.

I guess if we do enough shows and keep doing it long enough, then people will get the picture. But I can't really be bothered if they don't get the picture. That's not my concern.

I love to write - it is a great source of reflection, especially as I continue to meet many new inspiring people.

The lovely thing about writing comics for so many years is that comics is a medium that is mistaken for a genre. It's not that there are not genres within comics, but because comics tend to be regarded as a genre in itself, content becomes secondary; as long as I was doing a comic, people would pick it up.

Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.

I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.