Edward Albee Quotes

113 Sourced Quotes

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

Edward Albee
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.

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

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

Edward Albee
When one controls form, one doesn't do it with a stopwatch or a graph. One does it by sensing, again intuitively.

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

Edward Albee
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.

Edward Albee
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.

Edward Albee
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.

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

Edward Albee
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.

Edward Albee
I find that in the course of the day when I'm writing, after three or four hours of intense work, I have a splitting headache, and I have to stop. Because the involvement, which is both creative and self-critical, is so intense that I've got to stop doing it.

Edward Albee
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.

Edward Albee
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.

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

Edward Albee
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.

Edward Albee
Each time I sit down and write a play I try to dismiss from my mind as much as I possibly can the implications of what I've done before, what I'm going to do, what other people think about my work, the failure or success of the previous play. I'm stuck with a new reality that I've got to create.

Edward Albee
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.

Edward Albee
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.

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

Edward Albee
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.

Edward Albee
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.

Edward Albee
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.

Edward Albee
There are always going to be more actors than anybody can ever use.

Edward Albee
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.

Edward Albee
When you're dealing with a symbol in a realistic play, it is also a realistic fact. You must expect the audience's mind to work on both levels, symbolically and realistically. But we're trained so much in pure, realistic theater that it's difficult for us to handle things on two levels at the same time.

Edward Albee
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.

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

Edward Albee
The notion that women are less aesthetically profound and innovative than men--just not very important, if you know what I mean--doubtless spreads back to our beginnings as upright animals: the males hunted and killed for the family while the females stayed home in the cave and tended the strange little creatures they were giving birth to.

Edward Albee
Sometimes I think the experience of a play is finished for me when I finish writing it. If it weren't for the need to make a living, I don't know whether I'd have the plays produced.

Edward Albee