Edward Albee Quotes

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

All plays are social comment to one extent or another.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Musical beds is the faculty sport around here.

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

If the playwright is strong enough to hold on to reasonable objectivity in the face of either hostility or praise, he'll do his work the way he was going to anyway.

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

If the work of art is good enough, it must not be criticized for its theme. I don't think it can be argued.

To a certain extent I imagine a play is completely finished in my mind - in my case, at any rate - without my knowing it, before I sit down to write.

Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be.

The final evaluation of a play has nothing to do with immediate audience or critical response.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Some things that make sense to me don't make the same degree of sense to other people.

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.

Everybody wants to go see the big hit [at the theatre]. Not because it's any good. Because it's the big hit and everybody wants to be able to talk about the big hit.

What could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it

In my mind, Martha, you are buried in cement right up to your neck. No… right up to your nose… that’s much quieter.

To all of you who have made my being alive so wonderful, so exciting and so full, my thanks and all my love.

Knowing it--knowing it's true is one thing, but believing what you know... well, there's the tough part.

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