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."

"Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly."

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

"You gotta have a swine to show you where the truffles are."

"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."

"I'm not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, I'm rather happy to say — it leaves me something to do."

"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."

"A play is fiction — and fiction is fact distilled into truth."

"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."

"What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement."

"Primarily the characters must seem interested in what they, themselves, are doing and saying. While the lines must not read metronome-exact, I feel that a certain set rhythm will come about, quite of itself. No one rushes in on the end of anyone else's speech; no one waits too long. I have indicated, quite precisely, within the speeches of the Long-Winded Lady, by means of commas, periods, semi-colons, colons, dashes and dots (as well as parenthetical stage directions) the speech rhythms. Please observe them carefully, for they were not thrown in, like herbs on a salad, to be mixed about. I have underlined words I want stressed. I have capitalized for loudness, and used exclamation points for emphasis. There are one or two seeming questions that I have left the question mark off of. This was done o purpose, as an out-loud reading will make self-evident."

"American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties."

"Q: Do you find quite a difference between the audience at large and the critics as a group? A: Well, one is a group of human beings, one is not."

"I've noticed that there is not necessarily a great relationship between what the majority of critics have to say and what is actually true. Some of them are so busy trying to mold the public taste according to the limits of their perceptions, and others are so busy reflecting what they consider to be the public taste — that view limited again by their perception. You find very few critics who approach their job with a combination of information and enthusiasm and humility that makes for a good critic. But there is nothing wrong with critics as long as people don't pay any attention to them. I mean, nobody wants to put them out of a job and a good critic is not necessarily a dead critic. It's just that people take what a critic says as a fact rather than an opinion, and you have to know whether the opinion of the critic is informed or uninformed, intelligent of stupid — but most people don't take the trouble."

"I have been both overpraised and underpraised. I assume by the time I finish writing — and I plan to go on writing until I'm 90 or gaga — it will all equal itself out... You can't involve yourself with the vicissitudes of fashion or critical response. I'm fairly confident that my work is going to be around for a while. 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."

"I survive almost any onslaught with a shrug, which must appear as arrogance, but really isn't because I'm not an arrogant person. When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions — that you have something to say, that you know how to say it, that it's worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride. That's all. And then you go about your business, assuming you'd be the first to know if your talent has collapsed. I don't think I've been a commercial playwright ever. By some curious mischance, a couple of my plays managed to hit an area where commercial success was feasible. But it's wrong to think I'm a commercial playwright who has somehow ceased his proper function. I have always been the same thing — which is not a commercial playwright. I'm not after the brass ring. I very seldom get it anyway, and then it's accidental when I do. … So I write those things that interest me."

"If Attila the Hun were alive today, he'd be a drama critic."

"I created myself, and I'll attack anybody I feel like."

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

"Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve."

"The only time I'll get good reviews is if I kill myself."

"The gods too are fond of a joke."

"It is three and a half hours long, four characters wide and a cesspool deep."

"I remember two playwrights who affected me deeply, for their wit especially: Edward Albee and Samuel Beckett. I found their sense of absurdity comforting."

"You need great precision in the way the words are delivered, and in the way the emotions are understood. If you start leaving out words or putting them in or coming in on the wrong bit it spoils it. But Albee understands that when you are playing a play it's very important that it's naturalistic on the surface. That it is like jazz. If the actors are playing well together, you have the structure, you have the beats, but you maybe play it a bit differently every night."