Edward Albee Quotes

Im not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, Im rather happy to say-it leaves me something to do.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

There are a number of contemporary playwrights whom I admire enormously, but that's not at all the same thing as being influenced.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

George, who is out somewhere there in the dark, who is good to me - whom I revile, who can keep learning the games we play as quickly as I can change them. Who can make me happy and I do not wish to be happy. And yes, I do wish to be happy. George and Martha: Sad, sad, sad. Whom I will not forgive for having come to rest; for having seen me and having said: “Yes, this will do”. Who has made the hideous, the hurting, the insulting mistake of loving… me, and must be punished for it. George and Martha… Sad, sad, sad.

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

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

Some things that make sense to me don't make the same degree of sense to other people.

To write a play one must be born a playwright. Otherwise, you're starting at a huge disadvantage.

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.

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.

If you want a commercial success - it's the confusion of commerce with art. A successful play is not considered to be the best written. It is the one that sells the most tickets. Those standards are destructive [to theatre].

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.

Any definition which limits us is deplorable.

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.

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.

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

The playwright, along with any writer, composer, painter in this society, has got to have a terribly private view of his own value, of his own work. He's got to listen to his own voice primarily. He's got to watch out for fads, for what might be called the critical aesthetics.

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

The final evaluation of a play has nothing to do with immediate audience or critical response.

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.

Sincerity doesn't mean anything. A person can be sincere and be more destructive than a person who is insincere.

The greatest problem with Irish Wolfhounds, though, is that they don't live very long: their great hearts give out. A good deal of this is genetic, of course, but I think it is in part that they worry so for us, care so much.

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.

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

There's always the danger that there are so damn many things that a playwright can examine in this society of ours - things that have less to do with his artistic work than have to do with the critical and aesthetic environment - that perhaps he does have to worry about whether or not he is writing too fast. But then also, perhaps he should worry about getting as many plays on as possible before the inevitable ax falls.

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.

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

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.

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

A writer is a controlled schizophrenic.

Maybe it's a little more pertinent now since the whole concept of evolution is being questioned by the know-nothing Republican right. Yes, maybe the play's a little more pertinent now.

Writing should be useful. If it can’t instruct people a little bit more about the responsibilities of consciousness, there’s no point in doing it.

I suspect that the theme, the nature of the characters, and the method of getting from the beginning of the play to the end is already established in the unconscious.

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.

There is chaos behind the civility, of course.

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