Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Play
Case
Writing
Completely
Mind
Cases
Imagine
Knowing
Write
Extent
Certain
Finished
Without
Rate

More quotes by Edward Albee

Image
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
Image
Art should never try to be popular.
Edward Albee
Image
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
Image
First, I'll kill the dog with kindness, and if that doesn't work, I'll just kill him.
Edward Albee
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Musical beds is the faculty sport around here.
Edward Albee
Image
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
Image
One has always got to be terribly careful, since the theater is made up of a whole bunch of prima donnas, not to let the distortions occur.
Edward Albee
Image
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
Image
The final evaluation of a play has nothing to do with immediate audience or critical response.
Edward Albee
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The one living playwright I admire without any reservation whatsoever is Samuel Beckett. I have funny feelings about almost all the others.
Edward Albee
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The government is far more interested in taking, in regulated taking, than in promoting spontaneous generosity.
Edward Albee
Image
Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be.
Edward Albee