Edward Albee Quotes - Page 7

In the two or three or four months that it takes me to write a play, I find that the reality of the play is a great deal more alive for me than what passes for reality. I'm infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life. The involvement is terribly intense.

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.

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

When I was fifteen I wrote seven hundred pages of an incredibly bad novel - it's a very funny book I still like a lot. Then, when I was nineteen I wrote a couple hundred pages of another novel, which wasn't very good either. I was still determined to be a writer. And since I was a writer, and here I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.

Well, when I was six years old I decided, not that I was going to be, but with my usual modesty, that I was a writer.

In the theater, which is a sort of jungle, one does have to be a little bit careful. One mustn't be so rigid or egotistical to think that every comma is sacrosanct. But at the same time there is the danger of losing control and finding that somebody else has opened a play and not you.

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

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

Some writers' view of things depends upon the success of the final result. I'd rather stand or fall on my own concepts. But there is a fine line to be drawn between pointing up something or distorting it.

In rehearsals I get so completely wrapped up with the reality that's occurring on stage that by the time the play has opened I'm not usually quite as aware of the distinctions between what I'd intended and the result. There are many ways of getting the same result.

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

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.

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.

All plays are social comment to one extent or another.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

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

I suppose if you simplify things, it's going to make it easier to understand.

I think it is the responsibility of critics to rely less strenuously on, to use a Hollywood phrase, "what they can live with," and more on an examination of the works of art from an aesthetic and clinical point of view.

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.

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

As a fairly objective judgment, I do think that my plays as they come out are better than most other things that are put on the same year. But that doesn't make them very good necessarily.

I don't like the climate in which writers have to work in the USA and I think it's my responsibility to talk about it.

You want to dance with me, angel tits?

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.

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