American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.
EDWARD ALBEEAll 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.
More Edward Albee Quotes
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When a play enters my consciousness, is already a fairly well-developed fetus. I don’t put down a word until the play seems ready to be written.
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When you get old, you can’t talk to people because people snap at you…. That’s why you become deaf, so you won’t be able to hear people talking to you that way.
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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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Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.
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That’s the happiest moment. When it’s all done. When we stop. When we can stop.
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I suppose, writing a play is finding out what the play is.
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There is chaos behind the civility, of course.
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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.
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Audiences 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.
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I don’t like symbolism that hits you over the head. A symbol should not be a cymbal.
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Art has an obligation to offend.
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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.
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If you have no wounds, how can you know if you’re alive?
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I am pleased and reassured by the fact that a lot of younger playwrights seem to pay me some attention and gain some nourishment from what I do.
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I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves.
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I created myself, and I’ll attack anybody I feel like.
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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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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.
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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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Death is release, if you’ve lived all right.
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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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There are always going to be more actors than anybody can ever use.
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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.
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Maybe it’s a little more pertinent now since the whole concept of evolution is being questioned by the know-nothing Republican right. Yes, maybe the play’s a little more pertinent now.
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Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested.
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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.
EDWARD ALBEE