Your source material is the people you know, not those you don’t know, but every character is an extension of the author’s own personality.
EDWARD ALBEEWho’s afraid of Virginia Woolf means who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, who’s afraid of living life without false illusions.
More Edward Albee Quotes
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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.
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Art should never try to be popular.
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I created myself, and I’ll attack anybody I feel like.
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A play is fiction and fiction is fact distilled into truth.
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Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.
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Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don’t know the difference. George: No, but we must carry on as though we did. Martha: Amen.
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Death is release, if you’ve lived all right.
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Why we are here is an impenetrable question.
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Sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.
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A lot interests me – but nothing surprises me particularly.
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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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What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.
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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.’
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Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested.
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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 suppose, writing a play is finding out what the play is.
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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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Musical beds is the faculty sport around here.
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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.
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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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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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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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I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves.
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Writing has got to be an act of discovery, I write to find out what I’m thinking about.
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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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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.
EDWARD ALBEE