Edward Albee

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

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.

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

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.

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.

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.

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.

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

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

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

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.

Why we are here is an impenetrable question.

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.

Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process--it is, after all, black magic.

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

Im not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, Im rather happy to say-it leaves me something to do.

That's all that counts. People being sorry. Makes you feel better; gives you a sense of dignity, and that's all that's important; a sense of dignity. And it doesn't matter if you don't care or not, either. You got to have a sense of dignity, even if you don't care, 'cause, if you don't have that, civilization's doomed.

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.

Old people whimper, and cry, and belch, and make great hollow rumbling sounds at table; old people wake up in the middle of the night screaming, and find out they haven't even been asleep; and when old people are asleep, they try to wake up, and they can't... not for the longest time.

Every monster was a man first.