Play Quotes by Edward Albee

I suppose, writing a play is finding out what the play is.

— Edward Albee

The final evaluation of a play has nothing to do with immediate audience or critical response.

— Edward Albee

I'm not responsible for the commercialization. The people who produce the plays are responsible for it.

— Edward Albee

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

— Edward Albee

People often ask me how long it takes me to write a play, and I tell them 'all of my life.'

— Edward Albee

A play is fiction and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

— Edward Albee

“Knowing it--knowing it's true is one thing, but believing what you know... well, there's the tough part.”

— Edward Albee

All plays are social comment to one extent or another.

— Edward Albee

Im not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, Im rather happy to say-it leaves me…

— Edward Albee

Sometimes I think the experience of a play is finished for me when I finish writing it. If it weren't for the…

— Edward Albee

As a playwright, I imagine that in one fashion or another I've been influenced by every single play I've ever experienced.

— Edward Albee

I suspect that the theme, the nature of the characters, and the method of getting from the beginning of the play to…

— 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,…

— Edward Albee

Naturally, no writer who's any good at all would sit down and put a sheet of paper in a typewriter and start…

— Edward Albee

I don't think I've ever written about me. I'm not a character in any of my plays, except that boy, that silent…

— Edward Albee

I usually think about a play anywhere from six months to a year and a half before I sit down to write…

— Edward Albee

If you want a commercial success - it's the confusion of commerce with art. A successful play is not considered to be…

— Edward Albee

Within a year after I write a play I forget the experience of having written it. And I couldn't revise or rewrite…

— Edward Albee

I do think, or rather I sense that there is a relationship - at least in my own work - between a…

— Edward Albee

I know playwrights who like to kid themselves into saying that their characters are so well formed that they just take over.…

— Edward Albee

I've seen an awful lot of plays that I'd read before they were put into production and been shocked by what's happened…

— Edward Albee

When you're dealing with a symbol in a realistic play, it is also a realistic fact. You must expect the audience's mind…

— Edward Albee

There are lots of young vital playwrights who are experimenting, and these are the plays that people who are interested in the…

— Edward Albee

A play is a parenthesis that contains all the material you think has to be contained for the action of the play.…

— 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…

— 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…

— Edward Albee

George, who is out somewhere there in the dark, who is good to me - whom I revile, who can keep learning…

— Edward Albee

Curiously enough, the only two plays that I've done very much revision on were the two adaptations - even though the shape…

— Edward Albee

When I was fifteen I wrote seven hundred pages of an incredibly bad novel - it's a very funny book I still…

— Edward Albee

When people don't like the way a play ends, they're likely to blame the play.

— Edward Albee

Arthur Miller once payed me a great compliment saying that my plays were 'necessary.' I will go one step further and say…

— Edward Albee

When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions -- that you have something to say, that you know how…

— Edward Albee

As a fairly objective judgment, I do think that my plays as they come out are better than most other things that…

— Edward Albee

I discover that I am thinking about a play, which is the first awareness I have that a new play is forming.…

— Edward Albee

I think it's for the critics to decide whether or not their loathing of the play is based on something other than…

— Edward Albee

It's the function of a playwright to write. Some playwrights write a large number of plays, some write a small number.

— Edward Albee

If I've been accused a number of times of writing plays where the endings are ambivalent, indeed, that's the way I find…

— Edward Albee

If a man writes a brilliant enough play in praise of something that is universally loathed, the play, if it is good…

— Edward Albee

I imagine as an axiom you could say that the better the play, the less "creativity" the director need exert.

— Edward Albee

Very few people who met my adoptive mother in the last 20 years of her life could abide her, while many people…

— Edward Albee