EDWARD ALBEE QUOTES II

American playwright (1928-2016)

Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process -- it is, after all, black magic, and may lose its power if we look that particular gift horse too closely in the mouth.

EDWARD ALBEE

introduction, Three Tall Women

Tags: writing, creativity


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

WNBC TV interview, Jan. 9, 1966

Tags: playwriting, theatre


Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

EDWARD ALBEE

Shoptalk: Conversations About Theater and Film with Twelve Writers, One Producer--and Tennessee Williams' Mother

Tags: playwriting


The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-wheeling, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny. If you will approach it with childlike innocence -- putting your standard responses aside, for they do not apply -- if you will approach it on its own terms, I think you will be in for a liberating surprise. I think you may no longer be content with plays that you can't remember halfway down the block.

EDWARD ALBEE

"Which Theater Is the Absurd One?", 1962

Tags: avante-garde theatre


It is not enough to fill your juries, your advisory panels, with creative artists. You must put us in positions of policy control.

EDWARD ALBEE

Stretching My Mind

Tags: artists


There are always going to be more actors than anybody can ever use.

EDWARD ALBEE

WNBC TV interview, Jan. 9, 1966

Tags: actors, acting


People often ask me how long it takes me to write a play, and I tell them 'all of my life.' I know that's not the answer they're after -- what they really want is some sense of the time between the first glimmer of the play in my mind, and the writing down, and perhaps the duration of the writing down -- but "all my life" is the truest answer.

EDWARD ALBEE

introduction, Three Tall Women

Tags: playwriting


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

interview with Steve Capra, 1996

Tags: playwriting


Being different is ... interesting; there's nothing implicitly inferior or superior about it. Great difference, of course, produces natural caution; and if the differences are too extreme ... well, then, reality tends to fade away.

EDWARD ALBEE

Seascape

Tags: differences


I think you remember everything ... you just can't bring it to mind all the time.

EDWARD ALBEE

Three Tall Women

Tags: memory


There's nobody doesn't want something.

EDWARD ALBEE

Three Tall Women

Tags: desire


I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, [so] I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.

EDWARD ALBEE

Paris Review, Fall 1966

Tags: playwriting


Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end.

EDWARD ALBEE

preface, The Zoo Story


Death is release, if you've lived all right.

EDWARD ALBEE

Seascape

Tags: death, life


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

interview with Stephen Bottoms, 2003

Tags: writing


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

National Observer, Apr. 5, 1965

Tags: theatre


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

The Zoo Story


Well, you go into rehearsal, when directors and actors start asking all sorts of unnecessary questions, because they don't understand half of it--the nature of the characters. Almost all of those answers, if the play is well constructed, are answered during rehearsal. You solve all those problems. Sometimes it's because the actor doesn't understand the character. Then you fire the actor and get another one who will understand what's going on. 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

interview, The Believer

Tags: theatre, actors


I stopped acting when I was about nineteen, twenty, when I got thrown out of college. I did act for about ten years. I don't know. I suspect I'm still a reasonably good actor, but I don't really know that I want to get on the stage again ... and having to say all those boring words by me over and over again ... I don't know if I want to do that. Also, I like a certain amount of freedom of movement, and if you're acting, you're stuck in one place for a long time. Having said that, I will probably be onstage next fall.

EDWARD ALBEE

Stretching My Mind

Tags: acting


I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.

EDWARD ALBEE

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Tags: humor, absurdism