Quotes from Edward Albee

ROSS I hear a kind of … rushing sound, like a … wooooosh!, or … wings, or something. MARTIN It's probably the Eumenides.

You became the youngest person ever to win the Pritzker Prize, architecture's version of the Nobel.

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

I swear, if you existed I'd divorce you.

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

I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves.

The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.

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

A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it.

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?

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions.

There are only two things to write about: life and death.

People often ask me how long it takes me to write a play, and I tell them 'all of my life.'

My exposure to Beckett and to late O'Neill was probably important right at the time I gave up poetry and the novel.

If you're willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.

If you have no wounds, how can you know if you're alive?

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.

It is not enough to hold the line against the dark. It is your responsibility to lead into the light. People don't like the light--it reveals too much. But hand in hand with the creative artist, you can lead people into the wisdom that is known to all other animals: simply, that it is the dark we have to fear.

I think that's foolishness on the part of the playwright to write about himself. People don't know anything about themselves.

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

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.

When people can't abide things as they are, when they can't abide the present, they do one of two things ... either they ... either they turn to a contemplation of the past ... or they set about to ... alter the future. And when you want to change something ... YOU BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

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.

That's the happiest moment. When it's all done. When we stop. When we can stop.