American playwright (1928-2016)
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
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
We're all Beckett's children. Harold is probably more noticeably influenced by Beckett than I am ... I might be an adopted child.
EDWARD ALBEE
interview with Bruce J. Mann, 1999
The government is far more interested in taking, in regulated taking, than in promoting spontaneous generosity.
EDWARD ALBEE
Tiny Alice
You find very few critics who approach their job with a combination of information and enthusiasm and humility that makes for a good critic. But there is nothing wrong with critics as long as people don't pay any attention to them. I mean, nobody wants to put them out of a job and a good critic is not necessarily a dead critic. It's just that people take what a critic says as a fact rather than an opinion, and you have to know whether the opinion of the critic is informed or uninformed, intelligent of stupid -- but most people don't take the trouble.
EDWARD ALBEE
"Edward Albee: An Interview", Edward Albee: Planned Wilderness
American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.
EDWARD ALBEE
address to New York Cultural League, May 6, 1969
I have been both overpraised and underpraised. I assume by the time I finish writing -- and I plan to go on writing until I'm 90 or gaga -- it will all equal itself out.
EDWARD ALBEE
Conversations with Edward Albee
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
Stretching My Mind
Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.
EDWARD ALBEE
The Zoo Story
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
interview with Daniel Stern, 1998
I am pleased and reassured by the fact that a lot of younger playwrights seem to pay me some attention and gain some nourishment from what I do.
EDWARD ALBEE
Conversations with Edward Albee
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."
EDWARD ALBEE
interview with Digby Diehl, 1963
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
interview, The Believer
It is a lazy public which promotes a slothful and irresponsible theater.
EDWARD ALBEE
"Which Theater Is the Absurd One?", 1962
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
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
Conversations with Edward Albee
I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.
EDWARD ALBEE
Paris Review, Fall 1966
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
"The Decade of Engagement"
Aloneness is inevitable in being human. People cannot accept this. They should be aware of it and use it. It heightens your perceptions.
EDWARD ALBEE
The Daily Mail, 1969
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
interview at the time of receiving the Medal of the Academy of Achievement, Edward Albee: A Literary Companion