Edward Albee quotes:

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  • I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.

  • Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

  • Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions.

  • You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.

  • Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.

  • A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

  • Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

  • I don't like symbolism that hits you over the head. A symbol should not be a cymbal.

  • The difference between critics and audiences is that one is a group of humans and one is not.

  • I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.

  • Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.

  • Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

  • Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process--it is, after all, black magic.

  • The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.

  • All serious art is being destroyed by commerce. Most people don't want art to be disturbing. They want it to be escapist. I don't think art should be escapist. That's a waste of time.

  • Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.

  • What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.

  • Martha: Oh, I like your anger. I think that's what I like about you most. Your anger.

  • I swear, if you existed I'd divorce you.

  • Musical beds is the faculty sport around here.

  • Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve.

  • When a play enters my consciousness, is already a fairly well-developed fetus. I don't put down a word until the play seems ready to be written.

  • By some curious mischance, a couple of my plays managed to hit an area where commercial success was feasible. But it's wrong to think I'm a commercial playwright who has somehow ceased his proper function. I have always been the same thing -- which is not a commercial playwright. I'm not after the brass ring.

  • Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

  • American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.

  • It's one of those things a person has to do; sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.

  • The arts are the only things that separate us from the other animals. The arts are not decorative. ... They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves.

  • If you're willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.

  • It is not enough to hold the line against the dark. It is your responsibility to lead into the light. People don't like the light--it reveals too much. But hand in hand with the creative artist, you can lead people into the wisdom that is known to all other animals: simply, that it is the dark we have to fear.

  • I think we should all live on the precipe of life, as fully and as dangerously as possible. Everyone should make the assumption that they're going through life only once. Tomorrow we die. Why not take chances, extend yourself? How awful it is when a person comes to the end of life full of regret.

  • You're alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it?

  • School curricula that ignore the arts produce highly educated Barbarians

  • The condition of the theater is always an accurate measure of the cultural health of a nation. A play always exists in the present tense (if it is a valuable one), and its music -- its special noise -- is always contemporary. The most valuable function of the theater as an art form is to tell us who we are, and the health of the theater is determined by how much of that we want to know.

  • I think I was probably wondering, having looked at human beings for a long time, wondering if evolution ever took place. And I still have my doubts.

  • The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn't matter.

  • As a playwright, I imagine that in one fashion or another I've been influenced by every single play I've ever experienced.

  • I am sick of the disparity between things as they are and as they should be. I'm tired.I'm tired of the truth and I'm tired of lying about the truth.

  • That's the happiest moment. When it's all done. When we stop. When we can stop.

  • A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it.

  • One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.

  • What I mean by an educated taste is someone who has the same tastes that I have.

  • If you have no wounds, how can you know if you're alive?

  • Art has an obligation to offend

  • There are only two things to write about: life and death.

  • Creativity is magic. Don't examine it too closely.

  • Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.

  • It always seems to me better to slough off the answer to a question that I consider to be a terrible invasion of privacy - the kind of privacy that a writer must keep for himself.

  • One has always got to be terribly careful, since the theater is made up of a whole bunch of prima donnas, not to let the distortions occur.

  • People often ask me how long it takes me to write a play, and I tell them 'all of my life.'

  • Why we are here is an impenetrable question.

  • Anything you put in a play -- any speech -- has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along.

  • The function of art is to bring people into greater touch with reality, and yet our movie houses and family rooms are jammed with people after as much reality-removal as they can get.

  • First, I'll kill the dog with kindness, and if that doesn't work, I'll just kill him.

  • Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested.

  • I am pleased and reassured by the fact that a lot of younger playwrights seem to pay me some attention and gain some nourishment from what I do.

  • Within a year after I write a play I forget the experience of having written it. And I couldn't revise or rewrite it if I wanted to. Up until that point, I'm so involved with the experience of having written the play, and the nature of it, that I can't see what faults it might have. The only moment of clear objectivity that I can find is at the moment of critical heat - of self-critical heat when I'm actually writing.

  • The responsibility of the writer is to be a sort of demonic social critic -- to present the world and people in it as he sees it and say, "Do you like it? If you don't like it, change it.

  • I created myself, and I'll attack anybody I feel like.

  • Writing has got to be an act of discovery. Finding out things about what one is writing about.

  • Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don't know the difference. George: No, but we must carry on as though we did. Martha: Amen.

  • The characters' lives have gone on before the moment you chose to have the action of the play begin. And their lives are going to go on after you have lowered the final curtain on the play, unless you've killed them off.

  • A lot of people are confused by "hello." A lot of people are confused by a lot of things they shouldn't be confused by.

  • A playwright, especially a playwright whose work deals very directly with an audience, perhaps he should pay some attention to the nature of the audience response - not necessarily to learn anything about his craft, but as often as not merely to find out about the temper of the time, what is being tolerated, what is being permitted.

  • I think I sit down to the typewriter when it's time to sit down to the typewriter. That isn't to suggest that when I do finally sit down at the typewriter, and write out my plays with a speed that seems to horrify all my detractors and half of my well-wishers, that there's no work involved. It is hard work, and one is doing all the work oneself.

  • Audiences and, to a large extent, critics who want less from theater than it is possible for it to give. If everybody's encouraged to want less, you'll end up with less.

  • When people don't like the way a play ends, they're likely to blame the play.

  • I write to find out what I'm talking about.

  • What happens in a play is determined to a certain extent by what I thought might be interesting to have happen before I invented the characters, before they started taking over what happened, because they are three-dimensional individuals, and I cannot tell them what to do. Once I give them their identity and their nature, they start writing the play.

  • The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-wheeling, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny. If you will approach it with childlike innocence -- putting your standard responses aside, for they do not apply -- if you will approach it on its own terms, I think you will be in for a liberating surprise. I think you may no longer be content with plays that you can't remember halfway down the block.

  • When a critic sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the manner of a work, he is no longer a critic; he is a censor.

  • Every monster was a man first.

  • The health of a nation, a society, can be determined by the art it demands. We have insisted of television and our movies that they not have anything to do with anything, that they be our never-never land; and if we demand this same function of our live theatre, what will be left of the visual-auditory arts - save the dance (in which nobody talks) and music (to which nobody listens)?

  • I am a Doctor. A.B... M.A... PH.D... ABMAPHID! Abmaphid has been variously described as a wasting disease of the frontal lobes, and as a wonder drug. It is actually both.

  • Unless you are terribly, terribly careful, you run the danger-- without even knowing it is happening to you-- of slipping into the fatal error of reflecting the public taste instead of creating it. Your responsibility is to the public consciousness, not to the public view of itself.

  • A writer is a controlled schizophrenic.

  • I stopped acting when I was about nineteen, twenty, when I got thrown out of college. I did act for about ten years. I don't know. I suspect I'm still a reasonably good actor, but I don't really know that I want to get on the stage again ... and having to say all those boring words by me over and over again ... I don't know if I want to do that. Also, I like a certain amount of freedom of movement, and if you're acting, you're stuck in one place for a long time. Having said that, I will probably be onstage next fall.

  • When people can't abide things as they are, when they can't abide the present, they do one of two things ... either they ... either they turn to a contemplation of the past ... or they set about to ... alter the future. And when you want to change something ... YOU BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

  • Very few people who met my adoptive mother in the last 20 years of her life could abide her, while many people who have seen my play find her fascinating. Heavens, what have I done?!

  • The most profound indication of social malignancy ... no sense of humor. None of the monoliths could take a joke.

  • The only time I'll get good reviews is if I kill myself.

  • A play is fiction and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

  • I don't feel that catharsis in a play necessarily takes place during the course of a play. Often it should take place afterward.

  • I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves.

  • In a democracy you cannot stop public access to that art that will most misinform the people. You cannot stop people from being misinformed. But what you can do is to educate the people to the point that they will throw the rascals out.

  • I discover that I am thinking about a play, which is the first awareness I have that a new play is forming. When I'm aware of the play forming in my head, it's already at a certain degree in development.

  • The act of creation, as you very well know, is a lonely and private matter and has nothing to do with the public area... the performance of the work one creates.

  • You may dislike the intention enormously but your judgment of the artistic merit of the work must not be based on your view of what it's about. The work of art must be judged by how well it succeeds in its intention.

  • I suppose, writing a play is finding out what the play is.

  • True, I don't begin with an idea for a play - a thesis, in other words, to construct the play around. But I know a good deal about the nature of the characters. I know a great deal about their environment. And I more or less know what is going to happen in the play.

  • Usually, the way I write is to sit down at a typewriter after that year or so of what passes for thinking, and I write a first draft quite rapidly. Read it over. Make a few pencil corrections, where I think I've got the rhythms wrong in the speeches, for example, and then retype the whole thing. And in the retyping I discover that maybe one or two more speeches will come in. One or two more things will happen, but not much.

  • I know playwrights who like to kid themselves into saying that their characters are so well formed that they just take over. They determine the structure of the play. By which is meant, I suspect, only that the unconscious mind has done its work so thoroughly that the play just has to be filtered through the conscious mind. But there's work to be done - and discovery to be made.

  • In the thirties a whole school of criticism bogged down intellectually in those agitprop, social-realistic days. A play had to be progressive. A number of plays by playwrights who were thought very highly of then - they were very bad playwrights - were highly praised because their themes were intellectually and politically proper. This intellectual morass is very dangerous, it seems to me. A form of censorship.

  • If the work of art is good enough, it must not be criticized for its theme. I don't think it can be argued.

  • If the playwright is strong enough to hold on to reasonable objectivity in the face of either hostility or praise, he'll do his work the way he was going to anyway.

  • I think it is the responsibility of critics to rely less strenuously on, to use a Hollywood phrase, "what they can live with," and more on an examination of the works of art from an aesthetic and clinical point of view.

  • About four years ago I made a list, for my own amusement, of the playwrights, the contemporary playwrights, by whom critics said I'd been influenced. I listed twenty-five. It included five playwrights whose work I didn't know, so I read these five playwrights and indeed now I suppose I can say I have been influenced by them. The problem is that the people who write these articles find the inevitable similarities of people writing in the same generation, in the same century, and on the same planet, and they put them together in a group.

  • I don't like the climate in which writers have to work in the USA and I think it's my responsibility to talk about it.

  • I suppose if you simplify things, it's going to make it easier to understand.

  • A lot interests me - but nothing surprises me particularly.

  • When I was fifteen I wrote seven hundred pages of an incredibly bad novel - it's a very funny book I still like a lot. Then, when I was nineteen I wrote a couple hundred pages of another novel, which wasn't very good either. I was still determined to be a writer. And since I was a writer, and here I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.

  • In the theater, which is a sort of jungle, one does have to be a little bit careful. One mustn't be so rigid or egotistical to think that every comma is sacrosanct. But at the same time there is the danger of losing control and finding that somebody else has opened a play and not you.

  • As a fairly objective judgment, I do think that my plays as they come out are better than most other things that are put on the same year. But that doesn't make them very good necessarily.

  • In the two or three or four months that it takes me to write a play, I find that the reality of the play is a great deal more alive for me than what passes for reality. I'm infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life. The involvement is terribly intense.

  • In rehearsals I get so completely wrapped up with the reality that's occurring on stage that by the time the play has opened I'm not usually quite as aware of the distinctions between what I'd intended and the result. There are many ways of getting the same result.

  • I find that when my plays are going well, they seem to resemble pieces of music. But if I had to go into specifics about it, I wouldn't be able to. It's merely something that I feel.

  • I've seen an awful lot of plays that I'd read before they were put into production and been shocked by what's happened to them. In the attempt to make them straightforward and commercially successful, a lot of things go out the window.

  • If a man writes a brilliant enough play in praise of something that is universally loathed, the play, if it is good and well enough written, should not be knocked down because of its approach to its subject.

  • I usually think about a play anywhere from six months to a year and a half before I sit down to write it out.

  • If you intellectualize and examine the creative process too carefully it can evaporate and vanish. It's not only terribly difficult to talk about, it's also dangerous.

  • My sense of reality and logic is different from most people's.

  • Some writers' view of things depends upon the success of the final result. I'd rather stand or fall on my own concepts. But there is a fine line to be drawn between pointing up something or distorting it.

  • To a certain extent I imagine a play is completely finished in my mind - in my case, at any rate - without my knowing it, before I sit down to write.

  • I don't set out to write a play a year. Sometimes I've written two plays a year. There was a period of a year and half when I only wrote half a play. If it depresses some critics that I seem prolific, well, that's their problem as much as mine.

  • It's the function of a playwright to write. Some playwrights write a large number of plays, some write a small number.

  • Well, when I was six years old I decided, not that I was going to be, but with my usual modesty, that I was a writer.

  • Every writer's got to pay some attention, I suppose, to what his critics say because theirs is a reflection of what the audience feels about his work.

  • The ultimate judgment of a work of art, whether it be a masterpiece or a lesser event, must be solely in terms of its artistic success and not on Freudian guesswork.

  • If you examine the history of any playwright of the past twenty - five or thirty years - I'm not talking about the comedy boys, I'm talking about the more serious writers - it seems inevitable that almost every one has been encouraged until the critics feel that they have built them up beyond the point where they can control them; then it's time to knock them down again.

  • I do think, or rather I sense that there is a relationship - at least in my own work - between a dramatic structure, the form and sound and shape of a play, and the equivalent structure in music. Both deal with sound, of course, and also with idea, theme.

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