Edward Albee
Every monster was a man first.Collection: Men
When people don't like the way a play ends, they're likely to blame the play.Collection: Play
The characters' lives have gone on before the moment you chose to have the action of the play begin. And their lives are going to go on after you have lowered the final curtain on the play, unless you've killed them off.Collection: Character
What happens in a play is determined to a certain extent by what I thought might be interesting to have happen before I invented the characters, before they started taking over what happened, because they are three-dimensional individuals, and I cannot tell them what to do. Once I give them their identity and their nature, they start writing the play.Collection: Writing
Martha: Oh, I like your anger. I think that's what I like about you most. Your anger.Collection: Thinking
A writer is a controlled schizophrenic.Collection: Schizophrenic
I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves.Collection: Kindness
If you intellectualize and examine the creative process too carefully it can evaporate and vanish. It's not only terribly difficult to talk about, it's also dangerous.Collection: Creative
Influence is a matter of selection - both acceptance and rejection.Collection: Acceptance
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.Collection: Stage
Death is release, if you've lived all right.Collection: Death
The act of creation, as you very well know, is a lonely and private matter and has nothing to do with the public area... the performance of the work one creates.Collection: Lonely
Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process--it is, after all, black magic.Collection: Creative
Very few people who met my adoptive mother in the last 20 years of her life could abide her, while many people who have seen my play find her fascinating. Heavens, what have I done?!Collection: Mother
I find that when my plays are going well, they seem to resemble pieces of music. But if I had to go into specifics about it, I wouldn't be able to. It's merely something that I feel.Collection: Play
Each time I sit down and write a play I try to dismiss from my mind as much as I possibly can the implications of what I've done before, what I'm going to do, what other people think about my work, the failure or success of the previous play. I'm stuck with a new reality that I've got to create.Collection: Writing
The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-wheeling, 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. I think you may no longer be content with plays that you can't remember halfway down the block.Collection: Fun
The notion that women are less aesthetically profound and innovative than men--just not very important, if you know what I mean--doubtless spreads back to our beginnings as upright animals: the males hunted and killed for the family while the females stayed home in the cave and tended the strange little creatures they were giving birth to.Collection: Women
I'm back in fashion again for a while now. But I imagine that three or four years from now I'll be out again. And in another fifteen years I'll be back. If you try to write to stay in fashion, if you try to write to be the critics' darling, you become an employee.Collection: Fashion
You...you've been here quite a long time, haven't you?" What? Oh...yes. Ever since I married What's-her-name. Uh, Martha. Even before that. Forever. Dashed hopes, and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested. How do you like that for a declension, young man?Collection: Men
I stopped acting when I was about nineteen, twenty, when I got thrown out of college. I did act for about ten years. I don't know. I suspect I'm still a reasonably good actor, but I don't really know that I want to get on the stage again ... and having to say all those boring words by me over and over again ... I don't know if I want to do that. Also, I like a certain amount of freedom of movement, and if you're acting, you're stuck in one place for a long time. Having said that, I will probably be onstage next fall.Collection: Fall
I think I sit down to the typewriter when it's time to sit down to the typewriter. That isn't to suggest that when I do finally sit down at the typewriter, and write out my plays with a speed that seems to horrify all my detractors and half of my well-wishers, that there's no work involved. It is hard work, and one is doing all the work oneself.Collection: Hard Work
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.Collection: Jobs
That's the happiest moment. When it's all done. When we stop. When we can stop.Collection: Done
There are only two things to write about: life and death.Collection: Writing
Creativity is magic. Don't examine it too closely.Collection: Creativity
Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don't know the difference. George: No, but we must carry on as though we did. Martha: Amen.Collection: Differences
As a playwright, I imagine that in one fashion or another I've been influenced by every single play I've ever experienced.Collection: Fashion
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.Collection: Art
I write to find out what I'm talking about.Collection: Writing
I created myself, and I'll attack anybody I feel like.Collection: Feels
Why we are here is an impenetrable question.Collection: Why We Are Here
I don't like symbolism that hits you over the head. A symbol should not be a cymbal.Collection: Symbolism
Writing has got to be an act of discovery. Finding out things about what one is writing about.Collection: Writing
I don't feel that catharsis in a play necessarily takes place during the course of a play. Often it should take place afterward.Collection: Play
Art should never try to be popular.Collection: Art
When you get old, you can't talk to people because people snap at you.... That's why you become deaf, so you won't be able to hear people talking to you that way.Collection: Talking
I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.Collection: Running
The most profound indication of social malignancy ... no sense of humor. None of the monoliths could take a joke.Collection: Humor
A play is fiction and fiction is fact distilled into truth.Collection: Truth
A lot interests me - but nothing surprises me particularly.Collection: Surprise
The only time I'll get good reviews is if I kill myself.Collection: Reviews
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.Collection: Judging
I suppose, writing a play is finding out what the play is.Collection: Writing
A lot of people are confused by "hello." A lot of people are confused by a lot of things they shouldn't be confused by.Collection: Confused
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.Collection: Writing
First, I’ll kill the dog with kindness, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll just kill him.Collection: Firsts