The most profound indication of social malignancy ... no sense of humor. None of the monoliths could take a joke.
EDWARD ALBEE, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, [so] I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.
EDWARD ALBEE, Paris Review, Fall 1966
Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end.
EDWARD ALBEE, preface, Zoo Story
Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process -- it is, after all, black magic, and may lose its power if we look that particular gift horse too closely in the mouth.
EDWARD ALBEE, introduction, Three Tall Women
Every monster was a man first.
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, preface, The American Dream
Progress is a set of assumptions.
The government is far more interested in taking, in regulated taking, than in promoting spontaneous generosity.
I think you remember everything ... you just can't bring it to mind all the time.
EDWARD ALBEE, Three Tall Women
Sincerity doesn't mean anything. A person can be sincere and be more destructive than a person who is insincere.
EDWARD ALBEE, Wagner Literary Magazine, 1962
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.
EDWARD ALBEE, Saturday Review, May 4, 1966
You gotta have a swine to show you where the truffles are.
EDWARD ALBEE, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
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, The American Dream
Death is release, if you've lived all right.
There are lots of young vital playwrights who are experimenting, and these are the plays that people who are interested in the theatre should see. They should go off Broadway. They should go to the cafe theatres and see the experiments that are being made.
EDWARD ALBEE, WNBC TV interview, Jan. 9, 1966
There's nobody doesn't want something.
EDWARD ALBEE, Three Tall Women
Being different is ... interesting; there's nothing implicitly inferior or superior about it. Great difference, of course, produces natural caution; and if the differences are too extreme ... well, then, reality tends to fade away.
I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.
EDWARD ALBEE, Paris Review, Fall 1966
When people can't abide things as they are, when they can't abide the present, they do one of two things ... either they ... either they turn to a contemplation of the past ... or they set about to ... alter the future. And when you want to change something ... YOU BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
EDWARD ALBEE, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
There are always going to be more actors than anybody can ever use.
EDWARD ALBEE, WNBC TV interview, Jan. 9, 1966
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, Bill Bradfield's Books and Reading
That's the happiest moment. When it's all done. When we stop. When we can stop.
EDWARD ALBEE, Three Tall Women
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