Quotes from Edward Albee

Sincerity doesn't mean anything. A person can be sincere and be more destructive than a person who is insincere.

We're all Beckett's children. Harold is probably more noticeably influenced by Beckett than I am ... I might be an adopted child.

When a critic sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the manner of a work, he is no longer a critic; he is a censor.

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

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

The government is far more interested in taking, in regulated taking, than in promoting spontaneous generosity.

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.

When I'm writing a play I hear it like music. I use the same indications that a composer does for duration. There's a difference, I tell my students, between a semi-colon and a period. A difference in duration. And we have all these wonderful things, we use commas and underlining and all the wonderful punctuation things we can use in the same way a composer uses them in music. And we can indicate, as specifically as a composer, the way we want our piece to sound.

The function of art is to bring people into greater touch with reality, and yet our movie houses and family rooms are jammed with people after as much reality-removal as they can get.

I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.

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."

I do not invent characters. There they are. That's who they are. That's their nature. They talk and they behave the way they want to behave. I don't have a character behaving one way, then a point comes in the play where the person has to either stay or leave. If I had it plotted that the person leaves, then the person leaves. If that's what the person wants to do. I let the person do what the person wants or has to do at the time of the event.

Read the great stuff but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.

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.

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 its worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride.

The condition of the theater is always an accurate measure of the cultural health of a nation. A play always exists in the present tense (if it is a valuable one), and its music -- its special noise -- is always contemporary. The most valuable function of the theater as an art form is to tell us who we are, and the health of the theater is determined by how much of that we want to know.

It is a lazy public which promotes a slothful and irresponsible theater.

Aloneness is inevitable in being human. People cannot accept this. They should be aware of it and use it. It heightens your perceptions.

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?

A play is fiction -- and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

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.

Every character is an extension of the author's own personality.

Well, when you write about people of a certain age ... we are in a postsexual situation. If I write about younger people then I write sexually, because their drive is sexual. It depends upon the circumstances.