Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur Miller

A sideways jab at literary culture, this line treats authorship less as a sacred calling than as a parlor sport for insiders. Miller’s “Certainly” lands like a dry stage direction: the speaker is already a little tired, already aware of how quickly serious talk gets rerouted into gossip. Then he undercuts the whole enterprise with “diverse, if minor” - a neat compression that captures the strange breadth of this habit (everyone does it; it shows up everywhere) and its essential smallness (it rarely matters, but it always happens).

“Find the Author” names a social ritual: reading as detective work, yes, but also as status performance. Who wrote it? Who’s behind it? The question isn’t only textual; it’s tribal. If you can identify the voice, you’re fluent in the scene. If you can’t, you’re outside the circle. Miller’s subtext is skepticism toward the cult of personality that trails literature - the tendency to treat the author as the real content, and the work as a clue.

Coming from a playwright, the barb gains extra bite. Theater is the art form where authorship is most visibly diffused: actors, directors, producers, and audiences all reshape the text nightly. Miller watched reputations rise and fall on rumor, politics, and attribution as much as on craft. “Pastime” suggests leisure, but also distraction: a way for literary life to avoid harder questions about what the work is doing in the world, by turning criticism into a guessing game.