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
Deliver
Union
Unions
Western
Read
Telegrams
Stuff
Beckett
Away
Chekhov
Great
Discouraging

More quotes by Edward Albee

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You may dislike the intention enormously but your judgment of the artistic merit of the work must not be based on your view of what it's about. The work of art must be judged by how well it succeeds in its intention.
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
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The only time I'll get good reviews is if I kill myself.
Edward Albee
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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.
Edward Albee
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Some writers' view of things depends upon the success of the final result. I'd rather stand or fall on my own concepts. But there is a fine line to be drawn between pointing up something or distorting it.
Edward Albee
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Progress is a set of assumptions.
Edward Albee
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The government is far more interested in taking, in regulated taking, than in promoting spontaneous generosity.
Edward Albee
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Arthur Miller once payed me a great compliment saying that my plays were 'necessary.' I will go one step further and say that Arthur's plays are 'essential'
Edward Albee
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I think it is the responsibility of critics to rely less strenuously on, to use a Hollywood phrase, what they can live with, and more on an examination of the works of art from an aesthetic and clinical point of view.
Edward Albee
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Well, when I was six years old I decided, not that I was going to be, but with my usual modesty, that I was a writer.
Edward Albee
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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.
Edward Albee
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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.
Edward Albee
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I don't think I've ever written about me. I'm not a character in any of my plays, except that boy, that silent boy that turns up in Three Tall Women.
Edward Albee
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I usually think about a play anywhere from six months to a year and a half before I sit down to write it out.
Edward Albee
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When one controls form, one doesn't do it with a stopwatch or a graph. One does it by sensing, again intuitively.
Edward Albee
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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.
Edward Albee
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Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested.
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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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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You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.
Edward Albee