Edward Albee Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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?

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.

You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.

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.

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.

School curricula that ignore the arts produce highly educated Barbarians

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.

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.

Art has an obligation to offend

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.

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

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

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.

There are only two things to write about: life and death.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

What I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing-cards when you're a kid, and pornographic playing-cards when you're older. It's that when you're a kid you use the cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when you're older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.

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.

As a playwright, I imagine that in one fashion or another I've been influenced by every single play I've ever experienced.

A lot of people are confused by "hello." A lot of people are confused by a lot of things they shouldn't be confused by.

It always seems to me better to slough off the answer to a question that I consider to be a terrible invasion of privacy - the kind of privacy that a writer must keep for himself.

One has always got to be terribly careful, since the theater is made up of a whole bunch of prima donnas, not to let the distortions occur.

I created myself, and I'll attack anybody I feel like.

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.

Why we are here is an impenetrable question.

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.

What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.

I don't like symbolism that hits you over the head. A symbol should not be a cymbal.

Writing has got to be an act of discovery. Finding out things about what one is writing about.

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

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.

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.

I write to find out what I'm talking about.

I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.

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

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

Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don't know the difference. George: No, but we must carry on as though we did. Martha: Amen.

Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested.