I created myself, and I’ll attack anybody I feel like.
EDWARD ALBEEAudiences and, to a large extent, critics who want less from theater than it is possible for it to give. If everybody’s encouraged to want less, you’ll end up with less.
More Edward Albee Quotes
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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.
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There is chaos behind the civility, of course.
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A writer is a controlled schizophrenic.
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Musical beds is the faculty sport around here.
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Influence is a matter of selection – both acceptance and rejection.
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I am not interested in living in a city where there isn’t a production by Samuel Beckett running.
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Creativity is magic. Don’t examine it too closely.
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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?!
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Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested.
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When a critic sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the manner of a work, he is no longer a critic; he is a censor.
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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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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?
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Why we are here is an impenetrable question.
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Writing has got to be an act of discovery. Finding out things about what one is writing about.
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American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.
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I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.
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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.
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I write to find out what I’m talking about.
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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.
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The most profound indication of social malignancy no sense of humor. None of the monoliths could take a joke.
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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.
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What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.
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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.
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I think you remember everything, you just can’t bring it to mind all the time.
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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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People often ask me how long it takes me to write a play, and I tell them ‘all of my life.’
EDWARD ALBEE