Success Quote by Arthur Miller

The line lands with the blunt modesty of a man who spent his career staging moral reckoning and still distrusted moral grandstanding. Miller frames a life not as a heroic arc but as an inventory: faults, failures, “and so on.” That trailing phrase is doing work. It’s a shrug at confession, a refusal to turn self-critique into performance. Then he swerves into craft: “I have tried to make a good pair of shoes.” The image is deliberately unliterary, almost anti-prestigious. Shoes are practical, judged by wear, not applause. By choosing a trade metaphor, Miller strips “legacy” of its glamour and returns it to workmanship.

The subtext is a rebuke to the modern hunger for justification-by-visibility. A playwright famous for exposing public righteousness as private compromise (The Crucible, All My Sons, Death of a Salesman) implies that the only defensible self is the one anchored in competent, honest labor. It’s also a quiet correction to Willy Loman’s doomed creed: being “well liked” is not the point; being good at something real might be.

Context matters: Miller lived through an era when artists were pressured to make their lives into political statements, especially under McCarthyism, when he refused to name names and paid the price. The quote reads like an older Miller rejecting both martyrdom and celebrity. He doesn’t claim purity; he claims effort. “Some value in that” is the final hedge, small but stubborn, as if decency is less a triumph than a measurable, human-scale contribution.