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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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Edward Albee
Age: 88 †
Born: 1928
Born: March 12
Died: 2016
Died: September 16
Author
Playwright
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Screenwriter
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Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Edward Franklin Albee III
Edward Albee
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More quotes by Edward Albee
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
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
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
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
A lot interests me - but nothing surprises me particularly.
Edward Albee
The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.
Edward Albee
There may be lots of questions that anybody - an actor or a director or anybody - can ask about a character in a play of mine that are not answered in the play, but if it's a question that I don't think is relevant, I don't bother about it. There's no reason to ask it.
Edward Albee
I find that when my plays are going well, they seem to resemble pieces of music. But if I had to go into specifics about it, I wouldn't be able to. It's merely something that I feel.
Edward Albee
I usually think about a play anywhere from six months to a year and a half before I sit down to write it out.
Edward Albee
If the playwright is strong enough to hold on to reasonable objectivity in the face of either hostility or praise, he'll do his work the way he was going to anyway.
Edward Albee
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
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
Edward Albee
When a play enters my consciousness, is already a fairly well-developed fetus. I don't put down a word until the play seems ready to be written.
Edward Albee
If you have no wounds, how can you know if you're alive?
Edward Albee
First, I'll kill the dog with kindness, and if that doesn't work, I'll just kill him.
Edward Albee
Good writers define reality bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.
Edward Albee
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
The government is far more interested in taking, in regulated taking, than in promoting spontaneous generosity.
Edward Albee
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
I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.
Edward Albee
