I simply asked him if he was making any money. Is that a criticism? - Arthur Miller

A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse.

Immortality is like trying to carve your initials in a block of ice in the middle of July.

I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing — his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his "rightful" position in his society. Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.