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Good writers define reality bad ones merely restate it.

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

More quotes by Edward Albee

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True, I don't begin with an idea for a play - a thesis, in other words, to construct the play around. But I know a good deal about the nature of the characters. I know a great deal about their environment. And I more or less know what is going to happen in the play.
Edward Albee
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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Edward Albee
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Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.
Edward Albee
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Im not suggesting that the play is without fault all of my plays are imperfect, Im rather happy to say-it leaves me something to do.
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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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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It is a lazy public which promotes a slothful and irresponsible theater.
Edward Albee
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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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Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested.
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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Art should never try to be popular.
Edward Albee
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The ultimate judgment of a work of art, whether it be a masterpiece or a lesser event, must be solely in terms of its artistic success and not on Freudian guesswork.
Edward Albee
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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
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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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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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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.
Edward Albee
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As a playwright, I imagine that in one fashion or another I've been influenced by every single play I've ever experienced.
Edward Albee
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People often ask me how long it takes me to write a play, and I tell them 'all of my life.'
Edward Albee
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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
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I'm not responsible for the commercialization. The people who produce the plays are responsible for it.
Edward Albee