Quotes from Edward Albee

I'm not responsible for the commercialization. The people who produce the plays are responsible for it.

In a democracy you cannot stop public access to that art that will most misinform the people. You cannot stop people from being misinformed. But what you can do is to educate the people to the point that they will throw the rascals out.

Every monster was a man first.

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

Progress is a set of assumptions.

Time passes. You're not as ... recognizable now as you were.

Unless you are terribly, terribly careful, you run the danger--without even knowing it is happening to you--of slipping into the fatal error of reflecting the public taste instead of creating it. Your responsibility is to the public consciousness, not the public view of itself.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

There's nobody doesn't want something.

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.

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

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.