Quote

Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.

Edward Albee

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Edward Albee
Age: 88 †
Born: 1928
Born: March 12
Died: 2016
Died: September 16
Author
Playwright
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Theatrical Director
University Teacher
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Edward Franklin Albee III
Edward Albee
Great
Discouraging
Deliver
Union
Unions
Western
Read
Telegrams
Stuff
Beckett
Away
Chekhov

More quotes by Edward Albee

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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.
Edward Albee
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A writer is a controlled schizophrenic.
Edward Albee
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I'm not responsible for the commercialization. The people who produce the plays are responsible for it.
Edward Albee
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Influence is a matter of selection - both acceptance and rejection.
Edward Albee
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I imagine as an axiom you could say that the better the play, the less creativity the director need exert.
Edward Albee
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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.
Edward Albee
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First, I'll kill the dog with kindness, and if that doesn't work, I'll just kill him.
Edward Albee
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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.
Edward Albee
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Every writer's got to pay some attention, I suppose, to what his critics say because theirs is a reflection of what the audience feels about his work.
Edward Albee
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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 I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.
Edward Albee
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Musical beds is the faculty sport around here.
Edward Albee
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Good writers define reality bad ones merely restate it.
Edward Albee
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Writing has got to be an act of discovery....I write to find out what I'm thinking about.
Edward Albee
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My sense of reality and logic is different from most people's.
Edward Albee
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Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end.
Edward Albee
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Writing should be useful. If it can’t instruct people a little bit more about the responsibilities of consciousness, there’s no point in doing it.
Edward Albee
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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.
Edward Albee
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The most profound indication of social malignancy ... no sense of humor. None of the monoliths could take a joke.
Edward Albee
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Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
Edward Albee
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Some things that make sense to me don't make the same degree of sense to other people.
Edward Albee