Edward Albee Quotes

He that has been bitten by a snake is afraid of a rope.

- Edward Albee

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.

- Edward Albee

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

- Edward Albee

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.

- 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

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.

- Edward Albee

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.

- Edward Albee

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

- Edward Albee

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

- Edward Albee

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

- Edward Albee

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

My exposure to Beckett and to late O'Neill was probably important right at the time I gave up poetry and the novel.

- Edward Albee

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

- Edward Albee

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

- Edward Albee

Never marry for money; you can borrow it cheaper.

- Edward Albee

I swear, if you existed I'd divorce you.

- Edward Albee

The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.

- Edward Albee

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

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

- Edward Albee

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

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

- Edward Albee

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

- Edward Albee

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.

- Edward Albee

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