Edward Albee Quotes
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The government is far more interested in taking, in regulated taking, than in promoting spontaneous generosity.
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First, I'll kill the dog with kindness, and if that doesn't work, I'll just kill him.
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To write a play one must be born a playwright. Otherwise, you're starting at a huge disadvantage.
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I do not invent characters. There they are. That's who they are. That's their nature. They talk and they behave the way they want to behave. I don't have a character behaving one way, then a point comes in the play where the person has to either stay or leave. If I had it plotted that the person leaves, then the person leaves. If that's what the person wants to do. I let the person do what the person wants or has to do at the time of the event.
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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].
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A playwright, especially a playwright whose work deals very directly with an audience, perhaps he should pay some attention to the nature of the audience response - not necessarily to learn anything about his craft, but as often as not merely to find out about the temper of the time, what is being tolerated, what is being permitted.
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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.
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There are always going to be more actors than anybody can ever use.
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Any definition which limits us is deplorable.
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I think you remember everything ... you just can't bring it to mind all the time.
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A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it.
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I find that in the course of the day when I'm writing, after three or four hours of intense work, I have a splitting headache, and I have to stop. Because the involvement, which is both creative and self-critical, is so intense that I've got to stop doing it.
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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.
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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.
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About four years ago I made a list, for my own amusement, of the playwrights, the contemporary playwrights, by whom critics said I'd been influenced. I listed twenty-five. It included five playwrights whose work I didn't know, so I read these five playwrights and indeed now I suppose I can say I have been influenced by them. The problem is that the people who write these articles find the inevitable similarities of people writing in the same generation, in the same century, and on the same planet, and they put them together in a group.
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I've seen an awful lot of plays that I'd read before they were put into production and been shocked by what's happened to them. In the attempt to make them straightforward and commercially successful, a lot of things go out the window.
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Influence is a matter of selection - both acceptance and rejection.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Naturally, no writer who's any good at all would sit down and put a sheet of paper in a typewriter and start typing a play unless he knew what he was writing about.
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Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions.
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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.
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There are a number of contemporary playwrights whom I admire enormously, but that's not at all the same thing as being influenced.
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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.
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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.
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True, I don't begin with an idea for a play - a thesis, in other words, to construct the play around. But I know a good deal about the nature of the characters. I know a great deal about their environment. And I more or less know what is going to happen in the play.
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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.
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Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process--it is, after all, black magic.
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Related Authors
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Virginia Woolf Writer -
Arthur Miller Playwright -
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Tracy Letts Playwright -
Henrik Ibsen Playwright -
David Mamet Playwright -
Andy Warhol Artist -
Tom Stoppard Playwright -
Tennessee Williams Playwright -
Ernest Lehman Screenwriter -
Glenn Close Film actress -
Neil Simon Playwright -
Samuel Beckett Novelist -
Mike Nichols Film director -
Richard Burton Actor -
Eugene Ionesco Playwright -
Harold Pinter Playwright -
Eugene O'Neill Playwright -
August Wilson Playwright