Edward Albee Quotes

United States, Playwright
March 12, 1928 – September, 16, 2016.

Edward Franklin Albee III ( AWL-bee; March 12, 1928 – September 16, 2016) was an American playwright known for works such as The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and A Delicate Balance (1966). Three of his plays won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and two of his other works won the Tony Award for Best Play.

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.

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

Edward Albee
- Time
- Good

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

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

Edward Albee
- Long
- Distance
I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humour.

Edward Albee
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.

Edward Albee
- Real
- Experience
- Value
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.

Edward Albee
- Mind
I created myself, and I'll attack anybody I feel like.

Edward Albee

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.

Edward Albee
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.

Edward Albee
- Good
- Truth
- Bad
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.

Edward Albee
- Up
- Time
- Remember
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

Edward Albee
What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.

Edward Albee
- People
- Reality
A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

Edward Albee
- Truth

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

Edward Albee
If Attila the Hun were alive today, he'd be a drama critic.

Edward Albee
- Today
- Drama
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.

Edward Albee
- Happy