American playwright (1928-2016)
Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process -- it is, after all, black magic, and may lose its power if we look that particular gift horse too closely in the mouth.
EDWARD ALBEE
introduction, Three Tall Women
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
WNBC TV interview, Jan. 9, 1966
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
Seascape
It is not enough to fill your juries, your advisory panels, with creative artists. You must put us in positions of policy control.
EDWARD ALBEE
Stretching My Mind
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
EDWARD ALBEE
Shoptalk: Conversations About Theater and Film with Twelve Writers, One Producer--and Tennessee Williams' Mother
There are always going to be more actors than anybody can ever use.
EDWARD ALBEE
WNBC TV interview, Jan. 9, 1966
Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end.
EDWARD ALBEE
preface, The Zoo Story
People often ask me how long it takes me to write a play, and I tell them 'all of my life.' I know that's not the answer they're after -- what they really want is some sense of the time between the first glimmer of the play in my mind, and the writing down, and perhaps the duration of the writing down -- but "all my life" is the truest answer.
EDWARD ALBEE
introduction, Three Tall Women
The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-wheeling, 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. I think you may no longer be content with plays that you can't remember halfway down the block.
EDWARD ALBEE
"Which Theater Is the Absurd One?", 1962
I think you remember everything ... you just can't bring it to mind all the time.
EDWARD ALBEE
Three Tall Women
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
interview with Steve Capra, 1996
There's nobody doesn't want something.
EDWARD ALBEE
Three Tall Women
I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, [so] I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.
EDWARD ALBEE
Paris Review, Fall 1966
I stopped acting when I was about nineteen, twenty, when I got thrown out of college. I did act for about ten years. I don't know. I suspect I'm still a reasonably good actor, but I don't really know that I want to get on the stage again ... and having to say all those boring words by me over and over again ... I don't know if I want to do that. Also, I like a certain amount of freedom of movement, and if you're acting, you're stuck in one place for a long time. Having said that, I will probably be onstage next fall.
EDWARD ALBEE
Stretching My Mind
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
interview with Stephen Bottoms, 2003
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
National Observer, Apr. 5, 1965
Death is release, if you've lived all right.
EDWARD ALBEE
Seascape
Well, you go into rehearsal, when directors and actors start asking all sorts of unnecessary questions, because they don't understand half of it--the nature of the characters. Almost all of those answers, if the play is well constructed, are answered during rehearsal. You solve all those problems. Sometimes it's because the actor doesn't understand the character. Then you fire the actor and get another one who will understand what's going on. There may be lots of questions that anybody--an actor or a director or anybody--can ask about a character in a play of mine that are not answered in the play, but if it's a question that I don't think is relevant, I don't bother about it. There's no reason to ask it.
EDWARD ALBEE
interview, The Believer
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
preface, The American Dream
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
The Zoo Story