Edward Albee
I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.Collection: Humor
The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-swinging, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny. If you will approach it with childlike innocence - putting your standard responses aside, for they do not apply - if you will approach it on its own terms, I think you will be in for a liberating surprise.Collection: Funny
Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.
He that has been bitten by a snake is afraid of a rope.
Never marry for money; you can borrow it cheaper.
Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve.
A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.
What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.
I am convinced that no one is fully educated without a full grounding in the arts.
The difference between critics and audiences is that one is a group of humans and one is not.
I swear, if you existed I'd divorce you.
You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.
One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.
Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.
If Attila the Hun were alive today, he'd be a drama critic.
It's a good idea to have friends both in Heaven and in Hell.
The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.
American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.
I'm not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, I'm rather happy to say-it leaves me something to do.
My exposure to Beckett and to late O'Neill was probably important right at the time I gave up poetry and the novel.
That's all that counts. People being sorry. Makes you feel better; gives you a sense of dignity, and that's all that's important; a sense of dignity. And it doesn't matter if you don't care or not, either. You got to have a sense of dignity, even if you don't care, 'cause, if you don't have that, civilization's doomed.
Old people whimper, and cry, and belch, and make great hollow rumbling sounds at table; old people wake up in the middle of the night screaming, and find out they haven't even been asleep; and when old people are asleep, they try to wake up, and they can't... not for the longest time.
Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end; and I am at just the very beginning of what I hope will be a long and satisfying life in the theater. But, whatever happens, I am grateful to have had my novice work received so well, and so quickly.
If you're willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.Collection: Inspirational
The arts are the only things that separate us from the other animals. The arts are not decorative. ... They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves.Collection: Art
Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.Collection: Distance
The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn't matter.Collection: Writing
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?Collection: Alive
School curricula that ignore the arts produce highly educated BarbariansCollection: Music
If you have no wounds, how can you know if you're alive?Collection: Alive
I think I was probably wondering, having looked at human beings for a long time, wondering if evolution ever took place. And I still have my doubts.Collection: Thinking
All serious art is being destroyed by commerce. Most people don't want art to be disturbing. They want it to be escapist. I don't think art should be escapist. That's a waste of time.Collection: Art
Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions.Collection: Live Life
I think we should all live on the precipe of life, as fully and as dangerously as possible. Everyone should make the assumption that they're going through life only once. Tomorrow we die. Why not take chances, extend yourself? How awful it is when a person comes to the end of life full of regret.Collection: Regret
It is not enough to hold the line against the dark. It is your responsibility to lead into the light. People don't like the light--it reveals too much. But hand in hand with the creative artist, you can lead people into the wisdom that is known to all other animals: simply, that it is the dark we have to fear.Collection: Responsibility
Art has an obligation to offendCollection: Art
A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it.Collection: Responsibility
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.Collection: Art
People often ask me how long it takes me to write a play, and I tell them 'all of my life.'Collection: Writing
I think you remember everything ... you just can't bring it to mind all the time.Collection: Memories
Anything you put in a play -- any speech -- has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along.Collection: Character
Sincerity doesn't mean anything. A person can be sincere and be more destructive than a person who is insincere.Collection: Mean
What I mean by an educated taste is someone who has the same tastes that I have.Collection: Mean
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.Collection: Book
I am sick of the disparity between things as they are and as they should be. I'm tired.I'm tired of the truth and I'm tired of lying about the truth.Collection: Lying
In a democracy you cannot stop public access to that art that will most misinform the people. You cannot stop people from being misinformed. But what you can do is to educate the people to the point that they will throw the rascals out.Collection: Art
I’m infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life.Collection: Character
There are always going to be more actors than anybody can ever use.Collection: Acting
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.Collection: Character