Edward Albee Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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?

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

School curricula that ignore the arts produce highly educated Barbarians

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.

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.

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.

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions.

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.

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.

Art has an obligation to offend

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Creativity is magic. Don't examine it too closely.

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

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