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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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Edward Albee
Age: 88 †
Born: 1928
Born: March 12
Died: 2016
Died: September 16
Author
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Screenwriter
Theatrical Director
University Teacher
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Edward Franklin Albee III
Edward Albee
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More quotes by 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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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
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I write to find out what I'm talking about.
Edward Albee
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What I mean by an educated taste is someone who has the same tastes that I have.
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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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
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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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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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Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested.
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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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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There are always going to be more actors than anybody can ever use.
Edward Albee
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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Edward Albee
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The only time I'll get good reviews is if I kill myself.
Edward Albee
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Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
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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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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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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By some curious mischance, a couple of my plays managed to hit an area where commercial success was feasible. But it's wrong to think I'm a commercial playwright who has somehow ceased his proper function. I have always been the same thing - which is not a commercial playwright. I'm not after the brass ring.
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