Writing Quotes by Edward Albee

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.

— Edward Albee

I write to find out what I'm talking about.

— Edward Albee

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

— Edward Albee

A writer is a controlled schizophrenic.

— Edward Albee

There are only two things to write about: life and death.

— 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

Well, when I was six years old I decided, not that I was going to be, but with my usual modesty, that…

— Edward Albee

Writing has got to be an act of discovery. Finding out things about what one is writing about.

— 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

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

— 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

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

— 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'm back in fashion again for a while now. But I imagine that three or four years from now I'll be out…

— Edward Albee

I find that in the course of the day when I'm writing, after three or four hours of intense work, I have…

— Edward Albee

Well, when you write about people of a certain age ... we are in a postsexual situation. If I write about younger…

— 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

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

The playwright, along with any writer, composer, painter in this society, has got to have a terribly private view of his own…

— 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

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

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

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

— Edward Albee

Usually, the way I write is to sit down at a typewriter after that year or so of what passes for thinking,…

— 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

What happens in a play is determined to a certain extent by what I thought might be interesting to have happen before…

— 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

I don't like the climate in which writers have to work in the USA and I think it's my responsibility to talk…

— Edward Albee

Writing has got to be an act of discovery…I write to find out what I'm thinking about.

— 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…

— Edward Albee

To a certain extent I imagine a play is completely finished in my mind - in my case, at any rate -…

— 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

The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that…

— Edward Albee

Every writer's got to pay some attention, I suppose, to what his critics say because theirs is a reflection of what the…

— Edward Albee

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…

— Edward Albee

Each time I sit down and write a play I try to dismiss from my mind as much as I possibly can…

— Edward Albee

I have been both overpraised and underpraised. I assume by the time I finish writing -- and I plan to go on…

— 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