Quote

Good writers define reality bad ones merely restate it.

Edward Albee

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Good
Accomplish
Merely
Writers
Ones
Language
Reality
Restate
Book
Define
Writing
Opposites

More quotes by Edward Albee

Image
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
Image
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
Image
Every monster was a man first.
Edward Albee
Image
I'm not responsible for the commercialization. The people who produce the plays are responsible for it.
Edward Albee
Image
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.
Edward Albee
Image
What I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing-cards when you're a kid, and pornographic playing-cards when you're older. It's that when you're a kid you use the cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when you're older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.
Edward Albee
Image
The playwright, along with any writer, composer, painter in this society, has got to have a terribly private view of his own value, of his own work. He's got to listen to his own voice primarily. He's got to watch out for fads, for what might be called the critical aesthetics.
Edward Albee
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think you remember everything ... you just can't bring it to mind all the time.
Edward Albee
Image
To a certain extent I imagine a play is completely finished in my mind - in my case, at any rate - without my knowing it, before I sit down to write.
Edward Albee
Image
My sense of reality and logic is different from most people's.
Edward Albee
Image
The government is far more interested in taking, in regulated taking, than in promoting spontaneous generosity.
Edward Albee
Image
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
Image
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?
Edward Albee
Image
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.
Edward Albee
Image
The one living playwright I admire without any reservation whatsoever is Samuel Beckett. I have funny feelings about almost all the others.
Edward Albee
Image
Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end.
Edward Albee
Image
I write to find out what I'm talking about.
Edward Albee
Image
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