Edward Albee Quotes

“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?”

— Edward Albee

“Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.”

— Edward Albee

“Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested.”

— Edward Albee

“I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.”

— Edward Albee

The world is a zoo

— Edward Albee

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

— Edward Albee

“Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.”

— Edward Albee

“Musical beds is the faculty sport around here.”

— Edward Albee

“I am a doctor. A.B ... M.A ... PH.D ... ABMAPHID! Abmaphid has been variously described as a wasting disease of the frontal lobes, and as a wonder drug. It is actually both.I'm really very mistrustful.”

— Edward Albee

“I dance like the wind.”

— 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.”

— Edward Albee

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.

— Edward Albee

“What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.”

— Edward Albee

“A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.”

— Edward Albee

“I swear, if you existed I'd divorce you.”

— Edward Albee

“I'm not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, I'm rather happy to say-it leaves me something to do.”

— Edward Albee

“Who tolerates, which is intolerable; who is kind, which is cruel; who understands, which is beyond comprehension ...”

— Edward Albee

Stevie: (Not listening) That you can do these two things ... and not understand how it ... SHATTERS THE GLASS!!?? How it cannot be dealt with-how stop and forgiveness have nothing to do with it? and how I am destroyed? How you are? How I cannot admit it though I know it!? How I cannot deny it because I cannot admit it!? Cannot admit it, because it is outside of denying!?

— Edward Albee

“Alright ... what do you want me to say? Do you want me to say it's funny, so you can contradict me and say it's sad? Or do you want me to say it's sad so you can turn around and say no, it's funny. You can play that damn little game any way you want to, you know!”

— Edward Albee

“What I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing cards when you're a kid, and pornographic playing cards when you're older. It's that when you're a kid you use the cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when you're older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.”

— Edward Albee

Good writers define reality
Bad ones merely restate it.

— Edward Albee

“Why we are here is an impenetrable question.”

— Edward Albee

“I created myself, and I'll attack anybody I feel like.”

— Edward Albee

“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.”

— Edward Albee

The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-wheeling, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny. If you will approach it with childlike innocence
putting your standard responses aside, for they do not apply
if you will approach it on its own terms, I think you will be in for a liberating surprise. I think you may no longer be content with plays that you can't remember halfway down the block.

— Edward Albee

“Art has an obligation to offend”

— Edward Albee

“I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves.”

— Edward Albee

“The only time I'll get good reviews is if I kill myself.”

— Edward Albee

“What happens in a play is determined to a certain extent by what I thought might be interesting to have happen before I invented the characters, before they started taking over what happened, because they are three-dimensional individuals, and I cannot tell them what to do. Once I give them their identity and their nature, they start writing the play.”

— Edward Albee

“Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process
it is, after all, black magic.”

— Edward Albee

“When I'm writing a play I hear it like music. I use the same indications that a composer does for duration. There's a difference, I tell my students, between a semi-colon and a period. A difference in duration. And we have all these wonderful things, we use commas and underlining and all the wonderful punctuation things we can use in the same way a composer uses them in music. And we can indicate, as specifically as a composer, the way we want our piece to sound.”

— Edward Albee

“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.”

— Edward Albee

“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 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

“I stopped acting when I was about nineteen, twenty, when I got thrown out of college. I did act for about ten years. I don't know. I suspect I'm still a reasonably good actor, but I don't really know that I want to get on the stage again ... and having to say all those boring words by me over and over again ... I don't know if I want to do that. Also, I like a certain amount of freedom of movement, and if you're acting, you're stuck in one place for a long time. Having said that, I will probably be onstage next fall.”

— Edward Albee

“It is not enough to hold the line against the dark. It is your responsibility to lead into the light. People don't like the light
it reveals too much. But hand in hand with the creative artist, you can lead people into the wisdom that is known to all other animals: simply, that it is the dark we have to fear.”

— Edward Albee

“When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions
that you have something to say, that you know how to say it, that its worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride.”

— Edward Albee

“Well, when you write about people of a certain age ... we are in a postsexual situation. If I write about younger people then I write sexually, because their drive is sexual. It depends upon the circumstances.”

— Edward Albee

To write a play one must be born a playwright. Otherwise, you're starting at a huge disadvantage.

— Edward Albee

“The greatest problem with Irish Wolfhounds, though, is that they don't live very long: their great hearts give out. A good deal of this is genetic, of course, but I think it is in part that they worry so for us, care so much.”

— Edward Albee

“I do not invent characters. There they are. That's who they are. That's their nature. They talk and they behave the way they want to behave. I don't have a character behaving one way, then a point comes in the play where the person has to either stay or leave. If I had it plotted that the person leaves, then the person leaves. If that's what the person wants to do. I let the person do what the person wants or has to do at the time of the event.”

— Edward Albee

“Writing should be useful. If it can't instruct people a little bit more about the responsibilities of consciousness there's no point in doing it.”

— Edward Albee

“A writer is a controlled schizophrenic.”

— Edward Albee

“Sincerity doesn't mean anything. A person can be sincere and be more destructive than a person who is insincere.”

— Edward Albee

“The notion that women are less aesthetically profound and innovative than men
just not very important, if you know what I mean
doubtless spreads back to our beginnings as upright animals: the males hunted and killed for the family while the females stayed home in the cave and tended the strange little creatures they were giving birth to.”

— Edward Albee

“The condition of the theater is always an accurate measure of the cultural health of a nation. A play always exists in the present tense (if it is a valuable one), and its music
its special noise
is always contemporary. The most valuable function of the theater as an art form is to tell us who we are, and the health of the theater is determined by how much of that we want to know.”

— Edward Albee

Death is release, if you've lived all right.

— Edward Albee

“Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be.”

— Edward Albee

“There are always going to be more actors than anybody can ever use.”

— Edward Albee

“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.”

— Edward Albee