Edward Albee famous quotes

If you're willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.
-- Edward Albee

#Succeed #Failing #Willing

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

#Mean #Taste #Educated

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.
-- Edward Albee

#Writing #Reality

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.
-- Edward Albee

#Philosophy #Distance #Philosophical

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

#Creative #Black #Magic

One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.
-- Edward Albee

#Fun #Play #Mind

People often ask me how long it takes me to write a play, and I tell them 'all of my life.'
-- Edward Albee

#Writing #Play #Long

Art has an obligation to offend
-- Edward Albee

#Art #Obligation

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?!
-- Edward Albee

#Mother #Years #Play

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

#Reviews

The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn't matter.
-- Edward Albee

#Writing #Optimism #Matter

A play is fiction and fiction is fact distilled into truth.
-- Edward Albee

#Truth #Play #Fiction

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

#Stage #Hanging Out #Guts

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.
-- Edward Albee

#Character #People #Personality

You're alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it?
-- Edward Albee

#Alive #Realizing #Ends

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.
-- Edward Albee

#Art #Thinking #People

The most profound indication of social malignancy ... no sense of humor. None of the monoliths could take a joke.
-- Edward Albee

#Humor #Profound #Social

The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-wheeling, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny. If you will approach it with childlike innocence -- putting your standard responses aside, for they do not apply -- if you will approach it on its own terms, I think you will be in for a liberating surprise. I think you may no longer be content with plays that you can't remember halfway down the block.
-- Edward Albee

#Fun #Block #Thinking

I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.
-- Edward Albee

#Running #Cities #Beckett

I don't like symbolism that hits you over the head. A symbol should not be a cymbal.
-- Edward Albee

#Symbolism #Cymbals #Should

I write to find out what I'm talking about.
-- Edward Albee

#Writing #Talking

If you have no wounds, how can you know if you're alive?
-- Edward Albee

#Alive #Wounds

Any definition which limits us is deplorable.
-- Edward Albee

#Definitions #Limits

What I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing-cards when you're a kid, and pornographic playing-cards when you're older. It's that when you're a kid you use the cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when you're older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.
-- Edward Albee

#Real #Kids #Differences

By some curious mischance, a couple of my plays managed to hit an area where commercial success was feasible. But it's wrong to think I'm a commercial playwright who has somehow ceased his proper function. I have always been the same thing -- which is not a commercial playwright. I'm not after the brass ring.
-- Edward Albee

#Couple #Thinking #Play

I stopped acting when I was about nineteen, twenty, when I got thrown out of college. I did act for about ten years. I don't know. I suspect I'm still a reasonably good actor, but I don't really know that I want to get on the stage again ... and having to say all those boring words by me over and over again ... I don't know if I want to do that. Also, I like a certain amount of freedom of movement, and if you're acting, you're stuck in one place for a long time. Having said that, I will probably be onstage next fall.
-- Edward Albee

#Fall #College #Years

It is not enough to hold the line against the dark. It is your responsibility to lead into the light. People don't like the light--it reveals too much. But hand in hand with the creative artist, you can lead people into the wisdom that is known to all other animals: simply, that it is the dark we have to fear.
-- Edward Albee

#Responsibility #Dark #Artist

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

#Writing #Years #Play

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

#Memories #Thinking #Mind

School curricula that ignore the arts produce highly educated Barbarians
-- Edward Albee

#Music #Art #School

I swear, if you existed I'd divorce you.
-- Edward Albee

#Divorce #Swear

Progress is a set of assumptions.
-- Edward Albee

#Progress #Assumption

When a critic sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the manner of a work, he is no longer a critic; he is a censor.
-- Edward Albee

#Judging #Matter #Morality

I'm back in fashion again for a while now. But I imagine that three or four years from now I'll be out again. And in another fifteen years I'll be back. If you try to write to stay in fashion, if you try to write to be the critics' darling, you become an employee.
-- Edward Albee

#Fashion #Writing #Years

There is chaos behind the civility, of course.
-- Edward Albee

#Chaos #Clarity #Civility

Why we are here is an impenetrable question.
-- Edward Albee

#Why We Are Here

When a play enters my consciousness, is already a fairly well-developed fetus. I don't put down a word until the play seems ready to be written.
-- Edward Albee

#Writing #Play #Fetus

Every monster was a man first.
-- Edward Albee

#Men #Monsters #Firsts

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.
-- Edward Albee

#Writing #Responsibility #People

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

#Thinking

Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don't know the difference. George: No, but we must carry on as though we did. Martha: Amen.
-- Edward Albee

#Differences #Illusion #Amen

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.
-- Edward Albee

#Going Away #Unions #Stuff

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

#Truffles #Swine #Shows

Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested.
-- Edward Albee

#Good Intentions #Intention

You want to dance with me, angel tits?
-- Edward Albee

#Angel #Want

Unless you are terribly, terribly careful, you run the danger-- without even knowing it is happening to you-- of slipping into the fatal error of reflecting the public taste instead of creating it. Your responsibility is to the public consciousness, not to the public view of itself.
-- Edward Albee

#Running #Responsibility #Errors

And the west, encumbered by crippling alliances, and hardened with a morality too rigid to accommodate itself to the swing of events, must ..... eventually ..... fall.
-- Edward Albee

#Fall #Swings #Events

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

#Truth #Writing #Reality

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

#Want #Said #Do You Want Me

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

#Dog #Kindness #Firsts

You...you've been here quite a long time, haven't you?" What? Oh...yes. Ever since I married What's-her-name. Uh, Martha. Even before that. Forever. Dashed hopes, and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested. How do you like that for a declension, young man?
-- Edward Albee

#Men #Names #Long

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.
-- Edward Albee

#Hurt #Mistake #Dark

Musical beds is the faculty sport around here.
-- Edward Albee

#Sports #Musical #Bed

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

#Creative #Be Creative #Persons

The arts are the only things that separate us from the other animals. The arts are not decorative. ... They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves.
-- Edward Albee

#Art #Animal #Essentials

A writer is a controlled schizophrenic.
-- Edward Albee

#Schizophrenic

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.
-- Edward Albee

#Regret #Thinking #Why Not

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

#Editors #Differences #Groups

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

#Reality #People #Want

Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve.
-- Edward Albee

#Democracy #Politics #Want

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.
-- Edward Albee

#Ridiculous #Sense Of Humor #Fine

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

#Mean #Sincerity #Sincere

I think that's foolishness on the part of the playwright to write about himself. People don't know anything about themselves.
-- Edward Albee

#Writing #Thinking #People

Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end.
-- Edward Albee

#Funny Things #Careers #Ends

The government is far more interested in taking, in regulated taking, than in promoting spontaneous generosity.
-- Edward Albee

#Government #Generosity #Spontaneous

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.
-- Edward Albee

#Talking #People #Able

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

#Art #Littles #Response

All plays are social comment to one extent or another.
-- Edward Albee

#Play #Social #Comment

I'm not responsible for the commercialization. The people who produce the plays are responsible for it.
-- Edward Albee

#Play #People #Responsible

I do not invent characters. There they are. That's who they are. That's their nature. They talk and they behave the way they want to behave. I don't have a character behaving one way, then a point comes in the play where the person has to either stay or leave. If I had it plotted that the person leaves, then the person leaves. If that's what the person wants to do. I let the person do what the person wants or has to do at the time of the event.
-- Edward Albee

#Character #Play #Events

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.
-- Edward Albee

#Writing #Goes On #Assuming

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

#Lazy #Theater

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

#Writing #Play #Assumption

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

#Writing #Play #Starting

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

#Attention #Pay #Gains

A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it.
-- Edward Albee

#Responsibility #Comfort #Aids

I created myself, and I'll attack anybody I feel like.
-- Edward Albee

#Feels

Well, when you write about people of a certain age ... we are in a postsexual situation. If I write about younger people then I write sexually, because their drive is sexual. It depends upon the circumstances.
-- Edward Albee

#Writing #People #Age

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.
-- Edward Albee

#Character #Boys #Thinking

When people can't abide things as they are, when they can't abide the present, they do one of two things ... either they ... either they turn to a contemplation of the past ... or they set about to ... alter the future. And when you want to change something ... YOU BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
-- Edward Albee

#Change #Past #Two

The function of art is to bring people into greater touch with reality, and yet our movie houses and family rooms are jammed with people after as much reality-removal as they can get.
-- Edward Albee

#Art #Reality #People

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

#Acting #Use #Actors

I’m infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life.
-- Edward Albee

#Character #Reality #Everyday

Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be.
-- Edward Albee

#Art #Should #Dangerous

The health of a nation, a society, can be determined by the art it demands. We have insisted of television and our movies that they not have anything to do with anything, that they be our never-never land; and if we demand this same function of our live theatre, what will be left of the visual-auditory arts - save the dance (in which nobody talks) and music (to which nobody listens)?
-- Edward Albee

#Art #Land #Theatre

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.
-- Edward Albee

#Happiness #Play #Faults

Creativity is magic. Don't examine it too closely.
-- Edward Albee

#Creativity #Magic

You find very few critics who approach their job with a combination of information and enthusiasm and humility that makes for a good critic. But there is nothing wrong with critics as long as people don't pay any attention to them. I mean, nobody wants to put them out of a job and a good critic is not necessarily a dead critic. It's just that people take what a critic says as a fact rather than an opinion, and you have to know whether the opinion of the critic is informed or uninformed, intelligent of stupid -- but most people don't take the trouble.
-- Edward Albee

#Jobs #Stupid #Mean

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

#Death #Release

Being different is ... interesting; there's nothing implicitly inferior or superior about it. Great difference, of course, produces natural caution; and if the differences are too extreme ... well, then, reality tends to fade away.
-- Edward Albee

#Reality #Differences #Interesting

That's the happiest moment. When it's all done. When we stop. When we can stop.
-- Edward Albee

#Done #Moments

In a democracy you cannot stop public access to that art that will most misinform the people. You cannot stop people from being misinformed. But what you can do is to educate the people to the point that they will throw the rascals out.
-- Edward Albee

#Art #People #Democracy

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

#Writing #Responsibility #People

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

#Women #Home #Mean

The condition of the theater is always an accurate measure of the cultural health of a nation. A play always exists in the present tense (if it is a valuable one), and its music -- its special noise -- is always contemporary. The most valuable function of the theater as an art form is to tell us who we are, and the health of the theater is determined by how much of that we want to know.
-- Edward Albee

#Art #Play #Special

There are lots of young vital playwrights who are experimenting, and these are the plays that people who are interested in the theatre should see. They should go off Broadway. They should go to the cafe theatres and see the experiments that are being made.
-- Edward Albee

#Play #People #Theatre

Anything you put in a play -- any speech -- has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along.
-- Edward Albee

#Character #Play #Two

When I'm writing a play I hear it like music. I use the same indications that a composer does for duration. There's a difference, I tell my students, between a semi-colon and a period. A difference in duration. And we have all these wonderful things, we use commas and underlining and all the wonderful punctuation things we can use in the same way a composer uses them in music. And we can indicate, as specifically as a composer, the way we want our piece to sound.
-- Edward Albee

#Writing #Play #Differences

American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.
-- Edward Albee

#Half #Dull #Faculty