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A lot interests me - but nothing surprises me particularly.

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
Interests
Particularly
Surprise
Interest
Nothing
Surprises

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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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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My sense of reality and logic is different from most people's.
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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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
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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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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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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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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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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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Progress is a set of assumptions.
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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What I mean by an educated taste is someone who has the same tastes that I have.
Edward Albee
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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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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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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