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.
Edward AlbeeAudiences 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.
Edward AlbeeWhen 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.
Edward AlbeeDo you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
Edward AlbeeIf 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].
Edward Albee