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The final evaluation of a play has nothing to do with immediate audience or critical response.

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
Immediate
Final
Finals
Critical
Response
Audience
Nothing
Play
Evaluation

More quotes by 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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My sense of reality and logic is different from most people's.
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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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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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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Martha: Oh, I like your anger. I think that's what I like about you most. Your anger.
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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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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Musical beds is the faculty sport around here.
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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Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested.
Edward Albee
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A writer is a controlled schizophrenic.
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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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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I think you remember everything ... you just can't bring it to mind all the time.
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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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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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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When people don't like the way a play ends, they're likely to blame the play.
Edward Albee
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Good writers define reality bad ones merely restate it.
Edward Albee