“In the more than half-dozen plays before it [All My Sons] I had picked themes at random — which is to say that I had no awareness of any inner continuity running from one of these plays to the next, and I did not perceive myself in what I had written.” (p. 14)
“If I had wanted, then, to put the audience reaction into words, it would not have been ‘What happens next and why?’ so much as ‘Oh, God, of course!'” (p. 24)
“…if it is art he has created it must by definition bend itself to his observation rather than to his opinions or even his hopes.” (p. 36)
“…the real and inner theme [of The Crucible], which, again, was the handing over of conscience to another, be it woman, the state, or a terror, and the realization that with conscience goes the person, the soul immortal, and the ‘name’.” (p. 47)
“If there is one unseen goal towards which every play in this book strives, it is that very discovery and its proof — that we are made and yet are more than what made us.” (p. 59)
Arthur Miller. Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays, Introduction. New York: The Viking Press, 1957.