Albee Quotes & Sayings

Progress is a set of assumptions. — Edward Albee

How different our prayer life would be if we submitted our will to God's. Imagine if we asked only for things to benefit His kingdom. — Amber Albee Swenson

The government is far more interested in taking, in regulated taking, than in promoting spontaneous generosity. — Edward Albee

To all of you who have made my being alive so wonderful, so exciting and so full, my thanks and all my love. — Edward Albee

In a democracy you cannot stop public access to that art that will most misinform the people. You cannot stop people from being misinformed. But what you can do is to educate the people to the point that they will throw the rascals out. — Edward Albee

Maybe it's a little more pertinent now since the whole concept of evolution is being questioned by the know-nothing Republican right. Yes, maybe the play's a little more pertinent now. — Edward Albee

Good writers define reality
Bad ones merely restate it. — Edward Albee

All of my plays are about people missing the boat, closing down too young, coming to the end of their lives with regret at things not done, as opposed to things done. II find most people spend too much time living as if they're never going to die. — Edward Albee

When you get old, you can't talk to people because people snap at you ... That's why you become deaf, so you won't be able to hear people talking to you that way. — Edward Albee

You're in a straight line, buddy-boy, and it doesn't lead anywhere ... except maybe the grave. — Edward Albee

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? — Edward Albee

A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it. — Edward Albee

I swear, if you existed I'd divorce you. — Edward Albee

I'm not responsible for the commercialization. The people who produce the plays are responsible for it. — Edward Albee

Knowing it--knowing it's true is one thing, but believing what you know... well, there's the tough part. — Edward Albee

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

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

When I'm writing a play I hear it like music. I use the same indications that a composer does for duration. There's a difference, I tell my students, between a semi-colon and a period. A difference in duration. And we have all these wonderful things, we use commas and underlining and all the wonderful punctuation things we can use in the same way a composer uses them in music. And we can indicate, as specifically as a composer, the way we want our piece to sound. — Edward Albee

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. — Edward Albee

Lady, you can't fuck a metaphor. — Edward Albee

Martha: Oh, I like your anger. I think that's what I like about you most. Your anger. — Edward Albee

The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn't matter. — Edward Albee

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

The function of art is to bring people into greater touch with reality, and yet our movie houses and family rooms are jammed with people after as much reality-removal as they can get. — Edward Albee

The greatest problem with Irish Wolfhounds, though, is that they don't live very long: their great hearts give out. A good deal of this is genetic, of course, but I think it is in part that they worry so for us, care so much. — Edward Albee

I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves. — Edward Albee

Alright ... what do you want me to say? Do you want me to say it's funny, so you can contradict me and say it's sad? Or do you want me to say it's sad so you can turn around and say no, it's funny. You can play that damn little game any way you want to, you know! — Edward Albee

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? — Edward Albee

Being different is ... interesting; there's nothing implicitly inferior or superior about it. Great difference, of course, produces natural caution; and if the differences are too extreme ... well, then, reality tends to fade away. — Edward Albee

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. — Edward Albee

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

If you want a commercial success - it's the confusion of commerce with art. A successful play is not considered to be the best written. It is the one that sells the most tickets. Those standards are destructive [to theatre]. — Edward Albee

Everybody wants to go see the big hit [at the theatre]. Not because it's any good. Because it's the big hit and everybody wants to be able to talk about the big hit. — Edward Albee

If you spend a hundred bucks, or more, to go to the theatre, something should happen to you. Maybe somebody should be asking you some questions about your values, or about the way you think about things. Maybe you should come out of the theatre, something having happened to you. Maybe you should be changing, or thinking about changing. But if you just go there, and the only thing you worry about is where you left the damn car, then you wasted a hundred bucks. — Edward Albee

People can't have everything they want. You should know that; it's a rule; people can have some of the things they want, but they can't have everything. — Edward Albee

I'm back in fashion again for a while now. But I imagine that three or four years from now I'll be out again. And in another fifteen years I'll be back. If you try to write to stay in fashion, if you try to write to be the critics' darling, you become an employee. — Edward Albee

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

I am sick of the disparity between things as they are and as they should be. I'm tired.I'm tired of the truth and I'm tired of lying about the truth. — Edward Albee

You want to dance with me, angel tits? — Edward Albee

Very few people who met my adoptive mother in the last 20 years of her life could abide her, while many people who have seen my play find her fascinating. Heavens, what have I done?! — Edward Albee

Art should never try to be popular. — Edward Albee

Sincerity doesn't mean anything. A person can be sincere and be more destructive than a person who is insincere. — Edward Albee

The arts are the only things that separate us from the other animals. The arts are not decorative ... They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves. — Edward Albee

I guess we all feel like underdogs. I remember being a freshman at Brown University and not knowing what a WASP was. We were reading an Edward Albee play, and - it was just a moment of accepting, certainly that I wasn't very worldly, but also that a lot of the plays that I'd been reading, let's say other kinds of family plays, were speaking a foreign language. — Stephen Karam

I write to find out what I'm talking about. — Edward Albee

I am a doctor. A.B ... M.A ... PH.D ... ABMAPHID! Abmaphid has been variously described as a wasting disease of the frontal lobes, and as a wonder drug. It is actually both.I'm really very mistrustful. — Edward Albee

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

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions. — Edward Albee

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. — Edward Albee

When people can't abide things as they are, when they can't abide the present, they do one of two things ... either they ... either they turn to a contemplation of the past ... or they set about to ... alter the future. And when you want to change something ... YOU BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! — Edward Albee

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. — Edward Albee

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. — Edward Albee

In my mind, Martha, you are buried in cement right up to your neck. No ... right up to your nose ... that's much quieter. — Edward Albee

A lot of people are confused by "hello." A lot of people are confused by a lot of things they shouldn't be confused by. — Edward Albee

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. — Edward Albee

HONEY: (Apologetically, holding up her brandy bottle) I peel labels.
GEORGE: We all peel labels, sweetie; and when you get through the skin, all three layers, through the muscle, slosh aside the organs (An aside to NICK) them which is still sloshable
(Back to HONEY) and get down to bone ... you know what you do then?
HONEY: (Terribly interested) No!
GEORGE: When you get down to bone, you haven't got all the way, yet. There's something inside the bone ... the marrow ... and that's what you gotta get at. (A strange smile at MARTHA) — Edward Albee

That's what happens in plays, yes? The shit hits the fan.
Edward Albee — Edward Albee

It's sad to know you've gone through it all, or most of it, without ... that the one body you'v wrapped your arms around, the only skin you've ever known, is your own ... and that's it's dry, and not warm. — Edward Albee

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. — Edward Albee

George, who is out somewhere there in the dark, who is good to me - whom I revile, who can keep learning the games we play as quickly as I can change them. Who can make me happy and I do not wish to be happy. And yes, I do wish to be happy. George and Martha: Sad, sad, sad. Whom I will not forgive for having come to rest; for having seen me and having said: "Yes, this will do". Who has made the hideous, the hurting, the insulting mistake of loving ... me, and must be punished for it. George and Martha ... Sad, sad, sad. — Edward Albee

When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions
that you have something to say, that you know how to say it, that its worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride. — Edward Albee

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

We proceed in this society of ours on the possibly valid but untrue assumption that the public knows what it wants-- indeed, that it is given sufficient information about what is available to make such a judgment. And then we jump, irresponsibly and absurdly, to the notion that there is a valid relationship between what the public wants and what it should want. — Edward Albee

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

There is chaos behind the civility, of course. — Edward Albee

Who tolerates, which is intolerable; who is kind, which is cruel; who understands, which is beyond comprehension ... — Edward Albee

What I mean by an educated taste is someone who has the same tastes that I have. — Edward Albee

Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested. — Edward Albee

There's no limit to you, is there? — Edward Albee

You're alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it? — Edward Albee

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

Audiences and, to a large extent, critics who want less from theater than it is possible for it to give. If everybody's encouraged to want less, you'll end up with less. — Edward Albee

Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union. — Edward Albee

But the landlady is a fat, ugly, mean, stupid, unwashed, misanthropic, cheap, drunken bag of garbage. And you may have noticed that I very seldom use profanity, so I can't describe her as well as I might. — Edward Albee

Man hates something in himself. He has been able to defeat every natural obstacle but himself he cannot win over unless he kills every individual. And this self-hate which goes so closely in hand with self-love is what I wrote about. - in a letter to George Albee — John Steinbeck

Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be. — Edward Albee

Arthur Miller once payed me a great compliment saying that my plays were 'necessary.' I will go one step further and say that Arthur's plays are 'essential' — Edward Albee

The notion that women are less aesthetically profound and innovative than men
just not very important, if you know what I mean
doubtless spreads back to our beginnings as upright animals: the males hunted and killed for the family while the females stayed home in the cave and tended the strange little creatures they were giving birth to. — Edward Albee

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

Anything you put in a play
any speech
has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along. — Edward Albee

I said I was impressed, Martha. I'm beside myself with jealousy. What do you want me to do, throw up? — Edward Albee

All plays are social comment to one extent or another. — Edward Albee

I don't think I've ever written about me. I'm not a character in any of my plays, except that boy, that silent boy that turns up in Three Tall Women. — Edward Albee

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. — Edward Albee

Stevie: (Not listening) That you can do these two things ... and not understand how it ... SHATTERS THE GLASS!!?? How it cannot be dealt with-how stop and forgiveness have nothing to do with it? and how I am destroyed? How you are? How I cannot admit it though I know it!? How I cannot deny it because I cannot admit it!? Cannot admit it, because it is outside of denying!? — Edward Albee

I do not invent characters. There they are. That's who they are. That's their nature. They talk and they behave the way they want to behave. I don't have a character behaving one way, then a point comes in the play where the person has to either stay or leave. If I had it plotted that the person leaves, then the person leaves. If that's what the person wants to do. I let the person do what the person wants or has to do at the time of the event. — Edward Albee

There are lots of young vital playwrights who are experimenting, and these are the plays that people who are interested in the theatre should see. They should go off Broadway. They should go to the cafe theatres and see the experiments that are being made. — Edward Albee

What happens in a play is determined to a certain extent by what I thought might be interesting to have happen before I invented the characters, before they started taking over what happened, because they are three-dimensional individuals, and I cannot tell them what to do. Once I give them their identity and their nature, they start writing the play. — Edward Albee

That's the happiest moment. When it's all done. When we stop. When we can stop. — 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

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

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

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

My earliest experience was reading Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' at 8, you know, with a bunch of kids on my steps - on the stoops - and knowing that I wanted to direct them saying the lines. I don't really know how to articulate that 'cause there wasn't someone to show me. — Lee Daniels

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. — Edward Albee

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

A writer is a controlled schizophrenic. — Edward Albee

When a play enters my consciousness, is already a fairly well-developed fetus. I don't put down a word until the play seems ready to be written. — Edward Albee

Art has an obligation to offend — Edward Albee