All Quotes by Edward Albee
“Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don't know the difference.”
“I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.”
“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.”
“Never marry for money; you can borrow it cheaper.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“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.”