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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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Washington
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Edward Franklin Albee III
Edward Albee
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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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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 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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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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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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If you have no wounds, how can you know if you're alive?
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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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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The playwright, along with any writer, composer, painter in this society, has got to have a terribly private view of his own value, of his own work. He's got to listen to his own voice primarily. He's got to watch out for fads, for what might be called the critical aesthetics.
Edward Albee
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It always seems to me better to slough off the answer to a question that I consider to be a terrible invasion of privacy - the kind of privacy that a writer must keep for himself.
Edward Albee
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You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.
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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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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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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Writing should be useful. If it can’t instruct people a little bit more about the responsibilities of consciousness, there’s no point in doing it.
Edward Albee
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A lot interests me - but nothing surprises me particularly.
Edward Albee
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Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be.
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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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