Edward Albee Quotes - Page 3

I suppose, writing a play is finding out what the play is.

Every monster was a man first.

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.

When people don't like the way a play ends, they're likely to blame the play.

The characters' lives have gone on before the moment you chose to have the action of the play begin. And their lives are going to go on after you have lowered the final curtain on the play, unless you've killed them off.

A writer is a controlled schizophrenic.

What happens in a play is determined to a certain extent by what I thought might be interesting to have happen before I invented the characters, before they started taking over what happened, because they are three-dimensional individuals, and I cannot tell them what to do. Once I give them their identity and their nature, they start writing the play.

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

I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves.

The act of creation, as you very well know, is a lonely and private matter and has nothing to do with the public area... the performance of the work one creates.

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.

Influence is a matter of selection - both acceptance and rejection.

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

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.

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

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?!

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

I swear, if you existed I'd divorce you.

You may dislike the intention enormously but your judgment of the artistic merit of the work must not be based on your view of what it's about. The work of art must be judged by how well it succeeds in its intention.

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.

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.

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

I find that when my plays are going well, they seem to resemble pieces of music. But if I had to go into specifics about it, I wouldn't be able to. It's merely something that I feel.

Each time I sit down and write a play I try to dismiss from my mind as much as I possibly can the implications of what I've done before, what I'm going to do, what other people think about my work, the failure or success of the previous play. I'm stuck with a new reality that I've got to create.

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.