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.
EDWARD ALBEEMartha: Oh, I like your anger. I think that’s what I like about you most. Your anger.
More Edward Albee Quotes
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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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A play is fiction and fiction is fact distilled into truth.
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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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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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School curriculum that ignore the arts produce highly educated Barbarians.
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Death is release, if you’ve lived all right.
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As a playwright, I imagine that in one fashion or another I’ve been influenced by every single play I’ve ever experienced.
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I write to find out what I’m talking about.
EDWARD ALBEE -
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.
EDWARD ALBEE -
A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it.
EDWARD ALBEE -
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.
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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 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.
EDWARD ALBEE -
I don’t feel that catharsis in a play necessarily takes place during the course of a play. Often it should take place afterward.
EDWARD ALBEE -
There is chaos behind the civility, of course.
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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.
EDWARD ALBEE -
I suppose, writing a play is finding out what the play is.
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I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves.
EDWARD ALBEE -
What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.
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American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.
EDWARD ALBEE -
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
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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.
EDWARD ALBEE -
What I mean by an educated taste is someone who has the same tastes that I have.
EDWARD ALBEE -
First, I’ll kill the dog with kindness, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll just kill him.
EDWARD ALBEE -
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.
EDWARD ALBEE -
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.
EDWARD ALBEE