Quote

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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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
Character
Playwriting
Anything
Define
Play
Push
Things
Speech
Along
Either
Action
Two

More quotes by Edward Albee

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All plays are social comment to one extent or another.
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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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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Writing has got to be an act of discovery....I write to find out what I'm thinking about.
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'm not responsible for the commercialization. The people who produce the plays are responsible for it.
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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The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.
Edward Albee
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My sense of reality and logic is different from most people's.
Edward Albee
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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
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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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That's the happiest moment. When it's all done. When we stop. When we can stop.
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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You want to dance with me, angel tits?
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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Martha: Oh, I like your anger. I think that's what I like about you most. Your anger.
Edward Albee
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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
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One has always got to be terribly careful, since the theater is made up of a whole bunch of prima donnas, not to let the distortions occur.
Edward Albee
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I think you remember everything ... you just can't bring it to mind all the time.
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