Top 100 Edward Albee Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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'm really very mistrustful.
Edward Albee
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.
Edward Albee
#7. Who tolerates, which is intolerable; who is kind, which is cruel; who understands, which is beyond comprehension ...
Edward Albee
#8. 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
#9. You're in a straight line, buddy-boy, and it doesn't lead anywhere ... except maybe the grave.
Edward Albee
#10. 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.
Edward Albee
#11. 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
#12. 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
#14. 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
#15. To all of you who have made my being alive so wonderful, so exciting and so full, my thanks and all my love.
Edward Albee
#16. The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.
Edward Albee
#17. Everything becomes ... too late, finally. You know it's going on ... up on the hill; you can see the dust, and hear the cries, and the steel ... but you wait; and time happens. When you do go, sword, shield ... finally ... there's nothing there ... save rust; bones; and the wind.
Edward Albee
#18. First, I'll kill the dog with kindness, and if that doesn't work, I'll just kill him.
Edward Albee
#21. Sincerity doesn't mean anything. A person can be sincere and be more destructive than a person who is insincere.
Edward Albee
#22. Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested.
Edward Albee
#23. But the landlady is a fat, ugly, mean, stupid, unwashed, misanthropic, cheap, drunken bag of garbage. And you may have noticed that I very seldom use profanity, so I can't describe her as well as I might.
Edward Albee
#24. The difference between critics and audiences is that one is a group of humans and one is not.
Edward Albee
#26. 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
#27. I'm infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life.
Edward Albee
#28. To write a play one must be born a playwright. Otherwise, you're starting at a huge disadvantage.
Edward Albee
#29. I think I was probably wondering, having looked at human beings for a long time, wondering if evolution ever took place. And I still have my doubts.
Edward Albee
#30. I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves.
Edward Albee
#31. Why we are here is an impenetrable question.
Edward Albee
#32. 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
#33. I write to find out what I'm talking about.
Edward Albee
#34. 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
#35. The greatest problem with Irish Wolfhounds, though, is that they don't live very long: their great hearts give out. A good deal of this is genetic, of course, but I think it is in part that they worry so for us, care so much.
Edward Albee
#36. Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end.
Edward Albee
#37. I'm not responsible for the commercialization. The people who produce the plays are responsible for it.
Edward Albee
#39. The government is far more interested in taking, in regulated taking, than in promoting spontaneous generosity.
Edward Albee
#41. 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
#42. There is chaos behind the civility, of course.
Edward Albee
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.
Edward Albee
#46. School curricula that ignore the arts produce highly educated Barbarians
Edward Albee
#47. I said I was impressed, Martha. I'm beside myself with jealousy. What do you want me to do, throw up?
Edward Albee
#48. 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
#49. It is a lazy public which promotes a slothful and irresponsible theater.
Edward Albee
#50. All plays are social comment to one extent or another.
Edward Albee
#51. 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
#52. What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.
Edward Albee
#53. 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'
Edward Albee
#54. If Attila the Hun were alive today, he'd be a drama critic.
Edward Albee
#55. 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
#56. It's sad to know you've gone through it all, or most of it, without ... that the one body you'v wrapped your arms around, the only skin you've ever known, is your own ... and that's it's dry, and not warm.
Edward Albee
#57. Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions.
Edward Albee
#58. What I mean by an educated taste is someone who has the same tastes that I have.
Edward Albee
#59. All of my plays are about people missing the boat, closing down too young, coming to the end of their lives with regret at things not done, as opposed to things done. II find most people spend too much time living as if they're never going to die.
Edward Albee
#60. Any definition which limits us is deplorable.
Edward Albee
#61. I am sick of the disparity between things as they are and as they should be. I'm tired.I'm tired of the truth and I'm tired of lying about the truth.
Edward Albee
#62. Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.
Edward Albee
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#67. Martha: Oh, I like your anger. I think that's what I like about you most. Your anger.
Edward Albee
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. There are always going to be more actors than anybody can ever use.
Edward Albee
#71. 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
#72. Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
Edward Albee
#73. 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
#74. If you're willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.
Edward Albee
#75. You don't see anything, do you? You see everything but the goddamn mind; you see all the little specs and crap, but you don't see what goes on, do you?
Edward Albee
#76. People can't have everything they want. You should know that; it's a rule; people can have some of the things they want, but they can't have everything.
Edward Albee
#77. If you have no wounds, how can you know if you're alive?
Edward Albee
#78. Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be.
Edward Albee
#79. 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
#81. Good writers define reality
Bad ones merely restate it.
Edward Albee
#82. 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
#83. I think you remember everything ... you just can't bring it to mind all the time.
Edward Albee
#85. The only time I'll get good reviews is if I kill myself.
Edward Albee
#86. That's what happens in plays, yes? The shit hits the fan.
Edward Albee
Edward Albee
#87. A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it.
Edward Albee
#88. 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
#89. 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.
Edward Albee
#90. Knowing it--knowing it's true is one thing, but believing what you know... well, there's the tough part.
Edward Albee
#91. You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.
Edward Albee
#93. If you want a commercial success - it's the confusion of commerce with art. A successful play is not considered to be the best written. It is the one that sells the most tickets. Those standards are destructive [to theatre].
Edward Albee
#94. Alright ... what do you want me to say? Do you want me to say it's funny, so you can contradict me and say it's sad? Or do you want me to say it's sad so you can turn around and say no, it's funny. You can play that damn little game any way you want to, you know!
Edward Albee
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. That's the happiest moment. When it's all done. When we stop. When we can stop.
Edward Albee
#98. A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.
Edward Albee
#99. Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process
it is, after all, black magic.
Edward Albee
#100. 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
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