Quotes from Edward Albee

Lady, you can't fuck a metaphor.

You want to dance with me, angel tits?

You don't see anything, do you? You see everything but the goddamn mind; you see all the little specs and crap, but you don't see what goes on, do you?

Martha: ... I cry allllll the time; but deep inside, so no one can see me. I cry all the time. And Georgie cries all the time, too. We both cry all the time, and then what we do, we cry, and we take our tears, and we put 'em in the ice box, in the goddamn ice trays until they're all frozen and then... we put them... in our... drinks.

And the west, encumbered by crippling alliances, and hardened with a morality too rigid to accommodate itself to the swing of events, must ..... eventually ..... fall.

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 to the public view of itself.

First, I'll kill the dog with kindness, and if that doesn't work, I'll just kill him.

Musical beds is the faculty sport around here.

I dance like the wind.

I think we should all live on the precipe of life, as fully and as dangerously as possible. Everyone should make the assumption that they're going through life only once. Tomorrow we die. Why not take chances, extend yourself? How awful it is when a person comes to the end of life full of regret.

Everything becomes... too late, finally. You know it's going on... up on the hill; you can see the dust, and hear the cries, and the steel... but you wait; and time happens. When you do go, sword, shield... finally... there's nothing there... save rust; bones; and the wind.

You...you've been here quite a long time, haven't you?" What? Oh...yes. Ever since I married What's-her-name. Uh, Martha. Even before that. Forever. Dashed hopes, and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested. How do you like that for a declension, young man?

The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-swinging, 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.

If I've been accused a number of times of writing plays where the endings are ambivalent, indeed, that's the way I find life.

I think I was probably wondering, having looked at human beings for a long time, wondering if evolution ever took place. And I still have my doubts.

I'm infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life.

I am convinced that no one is fully educated without a full grounding in the arts.

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

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.

Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end; and I am at just the very beginning of what I hope will be a long and satisfying life in the theater. But, whatever happens, I am grateful to have had my novice work received so well, and so quickly.

It's a good idea to have friends both in Heaven and in Hell.

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.

The difference between critics and audiences is that one is a group of humans and one is not.

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