Actor Quotes by 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

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

— Edward Albee

“That's what happens in plays, yes? The shit hits the fan." --Edward Albee”

— Edward Albee

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

— Edward Albee

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

— Edward Albee

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

— Edward Albee

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

— 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

There are a number of contemporary playwrights whom I admire enormously, but that's not at all the same thing as being influenced.

— 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

If the playwright is strong enough to hold on to reasonable objectivity in the face of either hostility or praise, he'll do…

— Edward Albee

The characters' lives have gone on before the moment you chose to have the action of the play begin. And their lives…

— 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

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

— 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

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

— Edward Albee

There are two things that a playwright can have. Success or failure. I imagine there are dangers in both. Certainly the danger…

— Edward Albee

There's always the danger that there are so damn many things that a playwright can examine in this society of ours -…

— Edward Albee

By some curious mischance, a couple of my plays managed to hit an area where commercial success was feasible. But it's wrong…

— 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

A rather ugly thing starts happening: the playwright finds himself knocked down for works that quite often are just as good or…

— 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

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

— Edward Albee

About four years ago I made a list, for my own amusement, of the playwrights, the contemporary playwrights, by whom critics said…

— Edward Albee

I stopped acting when I was about nineteen, twenty, when I got thrown out of college. I did act for about ten…

— 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

I don't feel that catharsis in a play necessarily takes place during the course of a play. Often it should take place…

— Edward Albee

I think that's foolishness on the part of the playwright to write about himself. People don't know anything about themselves.

— Edward Albee

One has always got to be terribly careful, since the theater is made up of a whole bunch of prima donnas, not…

— Edward Albee

I don't pay much attention to how the plays relate thematically to each other. I think that's very dangerous to do, because…

— Edward Albee

If you examine the history of any playwright of the past twenty - five or thirty years - I'm not talking about…

— Edward Albee

In the thirties a whole school of criticism bogged down intellectually in those agitprop, social-realistic days. A play had to be progressive.…

— Edward Albee

I don't set out to write a play a year. Sometimes I've written two plays a year. There was a period of…

— Edward Albee

The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-swinging, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny. If you will approach it with childlike…

— Edward Albee

True, I don't begin with an idea for a play - a thesis, in other words, to construct the play around. But…

— Edward Albee

In the two or three or four months that it takes me to write a play, I find that the reality of…

— Edward Albee

A playwright, especially a playwright whose work deals very directly with an audience, perhaps he should pay some attention to the nature…

— Edward Albee