If you have no wounds, how can you know if you’re alive?
EDWARD ALBEEWhen people don’t like the way a play ends, they’re likely to blame the play.
More Edward Albee Quotes
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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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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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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.
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If you’re willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.
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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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A play is fiction and fiction is fact distilled into truth.
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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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First, I’ll kill the dog with kindness, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll just kill him.
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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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Death is release, if you’ve lived all right.
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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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There are always going to be more actors than anybody can ever use.
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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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A lot interests me – but nothing surprises me particularly.
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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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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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I suppose, writing a play is finding out what the play is.
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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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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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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.
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Sincerity doesn’t mean anything. A person can be sincere and be more destructive than a person who is insincere.
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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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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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I don’t like symbolism that hits you over the head. A symbol should not be a cymbal.
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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?!
EDWARD ALBEE -
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.
EDWARD ALBEE