Edward Albee - Writing Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

View all Edward Albee Quotes
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... You can't involve yourself with the vicissitudes of fashion or critical response. I'm fairly confident that my work is going to be around for a while. 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.

Edward Albee
I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, [so] I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.

Edward Albee
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.

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

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
I don't pay much attention to how the plays relate thematically to each other. I think that's very dangerous to do, because in the theater one is self-conscious enough without planning ahead or wondering about the thematic relation from one play to the next. One hopes that one is developing, and writing interestingly, and that's where it should end, I think.

Edward Albee
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.

Edward Albee
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.

Edward Albee