Quote

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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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
Seems
Enters
Wells
Fairly
Well
Developed
Play
Already
Writing
Consciousness
Ready
Written
Word
Fetus

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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Art should never try to be popular.
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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You want to dance with me, angel tits?
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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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'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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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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I said I was impressed, Martha. I'm beside myself with jealousy. What do you want me to do, throw up?
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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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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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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The government is far more interested in taking, in regulated taking, than in promoting spontaneous generosity.
Edward Albee
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There are lots of young vital playwrights who are experimenting, and these are the plays that people who are interested in the theatre should see. They should go off Broadway. They should go to the cafe theatres and see the experiments that are being made.
Edward Albee
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The one living playwright I admire without any reservation whatsoever is Samuel Beckett. I have funny feelings about almost all the others.
Edward Albee
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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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The act of creation, as you very well know, is a lonely and private matter and has nothing to do with the public area... the performance of the work one creates.
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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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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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