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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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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
Art
Time
Escapists
Think
Escapist
Thinking
Disturbing
People
Commerce
Destroyed
Waste
Serious

More quotes by 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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That's the happiest moment. When it's all done. When we stop. When we can stop.
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When you're dealing with a symbol in a realistic play, it is also a realistic fact. You must expect the audience's mind to work on both levels, symbolically and realistically. But we're trained so much in pure, realistic theater that it's difficult for us to handle things on two levels at the same time.
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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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Edward Albee
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I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves.
Edward Albee
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When a play enters my consciousness, is already a fairly well-developed fetus. I don't put down a word until the play seems ready to be written.
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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I am pleased and reassured by the fact that a lot of younger playwrights seem to pay me some attention and gain some nourishment from what I do.
Edward Albee
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When people don't like the way a play ends, they're likely to blame the play.
Edward Albee
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There may be lots of questions that anybody - an actor or a director or anybody - can ask about a character in a play of mine that are not answered in the play, but if it's a question that I don't think is relevant, I don't bother about it. There's no reason to ask it.
Edward Albee
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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.
Edward Albee
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Being different is ... interesting there's nothing implicitly inferior or superior about it. Great difference, of course, produces natural caution and if the differences are too extreme ... well, then, reality tends to fade away.
Edward Albee
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A lot interests me - but nothing surprises me particularly.
Edward Albee
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Progress is a set of assumptions.
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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If the playwright is strong enough to hold on to reasonable objectivity in the face of either hostility or praise, he'll do his work the way he was going to anyway.
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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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
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Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end.
Edward Albee