Time & Perspective Quote by Jonathan Miller

Miller lands the punch by making the theater sound like a mildly embarrassing hobby: grown adults in borrowed clothes, insisting on being someone else. The line’s power is in its deliberate shrink-wrapping of high culture. Shakespeare isn’t attacked as “frivolous”; the practice around him is. Miller’s not taking a swing at the canon so much as at the professional machinery that builds reputations, careers, and self-importance on an activity that can look, from the outside, like elaborate make-believe.

That deflation is classic Miller: the doctor-director-comic as skeptical humanist. He spent a lifetime inside the institutions that treat Shakespeare as civic religion, so the barb comes from intimacy, not ignorance. By framing acting as “pretending,” he forces the listener to confront the uneasy question artists dodge: what does the work do beyond producing a temporary spell? When the applause fades and the costumes go back on racks, what has actually changed?

The subtext isn’t nihilism; it’s a demand for justification. Miller is allergic to reverence without results. He’s also pointing at the existential bargain of performance: you give years to becoming a conduit for other people’s words, then look up and wonder where your own life went. In an era where cultural prestige can feel like a closed loop of insiders praising insiders, his line reads like a corrective: art survives not because it’s “important,” but because it can answer that blunt, adult question with something more than tradition.