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| I Found a Penny Today, So Here's a Thought |
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"The trouble with literature is that writers have to be the ones who write it. It's always partial; it's always partisan, and it's always incomplete. When I say that writers have to be the ones to write it, I mean that in order to generate the energy to create a big novel, a big play, an involved poem, one has to be a species of fanatic. You have to think that that is really the only thing worth doing. Otherwise, you can't generate the intensity to do it well. And to that degree, by generating that intensity, you are blinding yourself to what does not fit into some preconceived pattern in your own mind. There's no doubt about that to me, and I think that probably lay behind Plato's prohibition of the artist in society, He was right in the sense that the artist doesn't know what he is doing, to some extent. That is, we pretend, or like to believe, that we are depicting the whole truth of some situation, when as a matter of fact, the whole truth is, by definition, made impossible by the fact that we are obsessed people. I don't know of a first class piece of work written by what I would call, or a psychologist would call, a balanced, adjusted fellow who could easily be, let us say, a good administrator for a complicated social mechanism of some sort. It doesn't work that way. We are not constituted that way; so consequently, to be sure, it will have to be partial. The impulse to do it is obsessive; it always is. One of the fairest, most just writers was Tolstoi, who was, to make it short, quite mad."
—Arthur Miller, “Morality and Modern Drama: Interview with Phillip Gelb” (Death of a Salesman: Text and Criticism, ed. Gerald Weales), via GrandHotelAbyss
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