Edward Albee Quotes

A lot interests me - but nothing surprises me particularly.

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?!

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 writer is a controlled schizophrenic.

There is chaos behind the civility, of course.

I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

I said I was impressed, Martha. I'm beside myself with jealousy. What do you want me to do, throw up?

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

Influence is a matter of selection - both acceptance and rejection.

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

When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions -- that you have something to say, that you know how to say it, that its worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride.

It is a lazy public which promotes a slothful and irresponsible theater.

I have been both overpraised and underpraised. I assume by the time I finish writing -- and I plan to go on writing until I'm 90 or gaga -- it will all equal itself out.

I don't think I've ever written about me. I'm not a character in any of my plays, except that boy, that silent boy that turns up in Three Tall Women.

Any definition which limits us is deplorable.

Arthur Miller once payed me a great compliment saying that my plays were 'necessary.' I will go one step further and say that Arthur's plays are 'essential'

I imagine as an axiom you could say that the better the play, the less "creativity" the director need exert.

If I've been accused a number of times of writing plays where the endings are ambivalent, indeed, that's the way I find life.

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.

I think it's for the critics to decide whether or not their loathing of the play is based on something other than the play's merits or demerits. They must search their own souls, or whatever.

Art should never try to be popular.

I think you remember everything ... you just can't bring it to mind all the time.

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.

When you get old, you can't talk to people because people snap at you.... That's why you become deaf, so you won't be able to hear people talking to you that way.

Death is release, if you've lived all right.

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 has got to be an act of discovery....I write to find out what I'm thinking about.

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.

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.

Naturally, no writer who's any good at all would sit down and put a sheet of paper in a typewriter and start typing a play unless he knew what he was writing about.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

The one living playwright I admire without any reservation whatsoever is Samuel Beckett. I have funny feelings about almost all the others.