110+ Edward Albee Quotes On Education, Art And Writing

Edward Albee was an American dramatist and playwright. He is best known for his groundbreaking play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" which won the 1963 Tony Award for Best Play. He also wrote other critically acclaimed plays such as "The Zoo Story" and "The Sandbox". Following is our collection on famous quotes by Edward Albee on education, art, love.

Top 10 Edward Albee Quotes

1. If you're willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.
2. 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.
3. Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
4. Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions.
5. 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.
6. A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it.
7. People often ask me how long it takes me to write a play, and I tell them 'all of my life.'
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. As a playwright, I imagine that in one fashion or another I've been influenced by every single play I've ever experienced.

Edward Albee Short Quotes

• Why we are here is an impenetrable question.
• I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.
• I don't like symbolism that hits you over the head. A symbol should not be a cymbal.
• A lot interests me - but nothing surprises me particularly.
• Progress is a set of assumptions.
• I swear, if you existed I'd divorce you.
• Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested.
• The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.
• American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.
• A writer is a controlled schizophrenic.

Edward Albee Quotes About Education

School curricula that ignore the arts produce highly educated Barbarians — 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

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

Edward Albee Quotes About Art

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 ultimate judgment of a work of art, whether it be a masterpiece or a lesser event, must be solely in terms of its artistic success and not on Freudian guesswork. — 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

I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets. — Edward Albee

Art should never try to be popular. — Edward Albee

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

All serious art is being destroyed by commerce. Most people don't want art to be disturbing. They want it to be escapist. I don't think art should be escapist. That's a waste of time. — Edward Albee

Art has an obligation to offend — Edward Albee

You may dislike the intention enormously but your judgment of the artistic merit of the work must not be based on your view of what it's about. The work of art must be judged by how well it succeeds in its intention. — Edward Albee

If the work of art is good enough, it must not be criticized for its theme. I don't think it can be argued. — Edward Albee

Edward Albee Quotes About Life

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

There are only two things to write about: life and death. — Edward Albee

If I've been accused a number of times of writing plays where the endings are ambivalent, indeed, that's the way I find life. — Edward Albee

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

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

Edward Albee Quotes About Writing

The responsibility of the writer is to be a sort of demonic social critic -- to present the world and people in it as he sees it and say, "Do you like it? If you don't like it, change it. — Edward Albee

If a man writes a brilliant enough play in praise of something that is universally loathed, the play, if it is good and well enough written, should not be knocked down because of its approach to its subject. — Edward Albee

I find that in the course of the day when I'm writing, after three or four hours of intense work, I have a splitting headache, and I have to stop. Because the involvement, which is both creative and self-critical, is so intense that I've got to stop doing it. — Edward Albee

Each time I sit down and write a play I try to dismiss from my mind as much as I possibly can the implications of what I've done before, what I'm going to do, what other people think about my work, the failure or success of the previous play. I'm stuck with a new reality that I've got to create. — Edward Albee

I don't set out to write a play a year. Sometimes I've written two plays a year. There was a period of a year and half when I only wrote half a play. If it depresses some critics that I seem prolific, well, that's their problem as much as mine. — Edward Albee

It's the function of a playwright to write. Some playwrights write a large number of plays, some write a small number. — Edward Albee

I suppose, writing a play is finding out what the play is. — Edward Albee

Sometimes I think the experience of a play is finished for me when I finish writing it. If it weren't for the need to make a living, I don't know whether I'd have the plays produced. — Edward Albee

To a certain extent I imagine a play is completely finished in my mind - in my case, at any rate - without my knowing it, before I sit down to write. — Edward Albee

I usually think about a play anywhere from six months to a year and a half before I sit down to write it out. — Edward Albee

Edward Albee Quotes About Play

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

I don't feel that catharsis in a play necessarily takes place during the course of a play. Often it should take place afterward. — 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

A play is a parenthesis that contains all the material you think has to be contained for the action of the play. Where do you end that? Where the characters seem to come to a pause... where they seem to want to stop - rather like, I would think, the construction of a piece of music. — Edward Albee

I suspect that the theme, the nature of the characters, and the method of getting from the beginning of the play to the end is already established in the unconscious. — Edward Albee

The characters' lives have gone on before the moment you chose to have the action of the play begin. And their lives are going to go on after you have lowered the final curtain on the play, unless you've killed them off. — Edward Albee

True, I don't begin with an idea for a play - a thesis, in other words, to construct the play around. But I know a good deal about the nature of the characters. I know a great deal about their environment. And I more or less know what is going to happen in the play. — Edward Albee

I discover that I am thinking about a play, which is the first awareness I have that a new play is forming. When I'm aware of the play forming in my head, it's already at a certain degree in development. — Edward Albee

When people don't like the way a play ends, they're likely to blame the play. — 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

Edward Albee Quotes About Sense

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

Some things that make sense to me don't make the same degree of sense to other people. — Edward Albee

My sense of reality and logic is different from most people's. — Edward Albee

When one controls form, one doesn't do it with a stopwatch or a graph. One does it by sensing, again intuitively. — Edward Albee

I do think, or rather I sense that there is a relationship - at least in my own work - between a dramatic structure, the form and sound and shape of a play, and the equivalent structure in music. Both deal with sound, of course, and also with idea, theme. — Edward Albee

The most profound indication of social malignancy ... no sense of humor. None of the monoliths could take a joke. — Edward Albee

Edward Albee Quotes About People

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

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

I think that's foolishness on the part of the playwright to write about himself. People don't know anything about themselves. — 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

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

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

Writing should be useful. If it can’t instruct people a little bit more about the responsibilities of consciousness, there’s no point in doing it. — Edward Albee

Well, when you write about people of a certain age ... we are in a postsexual situation. If I write about younger people then I write sexually, because their drive is sexual. It depends upon the circumstances. — 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

Edward Albee Quotes About Reality

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

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

In rehearsals I get so completely wrapped up with the reality that's occurring on stage that by the time the play has opened I'm not usually quite as aware of the distinctions between what I'd intended and the result. There are many ways of getting the same result. — Edward Albee

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

Edward Albee Famous Quotes And Sayings

It is not enough to hold the line against the dark. It is your responsibility to lead into the light. People don't like the light--it reveals too much. But hand in hand with the creative artist, you can lead people into the wisdom that is known to all other animals: simply, that it is the dark we have to fear. — 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

One has always got to be terribly careful, since the theater is made up of a whole bunch of prima donnas, not to let the distortions occur. — Edward Albee

It always seems to me better to slough off the answer to a question that I consider to be a terrible invasion of privacy - the kind of privacy that a writer must keep for himself. — Edward Albee

Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don't know the difference. George: No, but we must carry on as though we did. Martha: Amen. — Edward Albee

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

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

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

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

I don't like the climate in which writers have to work in the USA and I think it's my responsibility to talk about it. — 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

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

Well, when I was six years old I decided, not that I was going to be, but with my usual modesty, that I was a writer. — Edward Albee

A rather ugly thing starts happening: the playwright finds himself knocked down for works that quite often are just as good or better than the works he's been praised for previously. And a lot of playwrights become confused by this and they start doing imitations of what they've done before, or they try to do something entirely different, in which case they get accused by the same critics of not doing what they used to do so well. — Edward Albee

When you're dealing with a symbol in a realistic play, it is also a realistic fact. You must expect the audience's mind to work on both levels, symbolically and realistically. But we're trained so much in pure, realistic theater that it's difficult for us to handle things on two levels at the same time. — Edward Albee

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

There are two things that a playwright can have. Success or failure. I imagine there are dangers in both. Certainly the danger of being faced with indifference or hostility is discouraging, and it may be that success - acceptance if it's too quick, too lightning-quick - can turn the heads of some people. — Edward Albee

As a fairly objective judgment, I do think that my plays as they come out are better than most other things that are put on the same year. But that doesn't make them very good necessarily. — Edward Albee

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 one living playwright I admire without any reservation whatsoever is Samuel Beckett. I have funny feelings about almost all the others. — Edward Albee

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

I've seen an awful lot of plays that I'd read before they were put into production and been shocked by what's happened to them. In the attempt to make them straightforward and commercially successful, a lot of things go out the window. — Edward Albee

I think you remember everything ... you just can't bring it to mind all the time. — 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

Every writer's got to pay some attention, I suppose, to what his critics say because theirs is a reflection of what the audience feels about his work. — Edward Albee

I think it is the responsibility of critics to rely less strenuously on, to use a Hollywood phrase, "what they can live with," and more on an examination of the works of art from an aesthetic and clinical point of view. — Edward Albee

There are always going to be more actors than anybody can ever use. — Edward Albee

If you examine the history of any playwright of the past twenty - five or thirty years - I'm not talking about the comedy boys, I'm talking about the more serious writers - it seems inevitable that almost every one has been encouraged until the critics feel that they have built them up beyond the point where they can control them; then it's time to knock them down again. — Edward Albee

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

I think it's for the critics to decide whether or not their loathing of the play is based on something other than the play's merits or demerits. They must search their own souls, or whatever. — Edward Albee

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — Edward Albee

In the two or three or four months that it takes me to write a play, I find that the reality of the play is a great deal more alive for me than what passes for reality. I'm infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life. The involvement is terribly intense. — Edward Albee

By some curious mischance, a couple of my plays managed to hit an area where commercial success was feasible. But it's wrong to think I'm a commercial playwright who has somehow ceased his proper function. I have always been the same thing - which is not a commercial playwright. I'm not after the brass ring. — 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

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

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

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

Influence is a matter of selection - both acceptance and rejection. — Edward Albee

Any definition which limits us is deplorable. — Edward Albee

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

There are a number of contemporary playwrights whom I admire enormously, but that's not at all the same thing as being influenced. — Edward Albee

The act of creation, as you very well know, is a lonely and private matter and has nothing to do with the public area... the performance of the work one creates. — Edward Albee

Writing has got to be an act of discovery. Finding out things about what one is writing about. — Edward Albee

The final evaluation of a play has nothing to do with immediate audience or critical response. — 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

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

I know playwrights who like to kid themselves into saying that their characters are so well formed that they just take over. They determine the structure of the play. By which is meant, I suspect, only that the unconscious mind has done its work so thoroughly that the play just has to be filtered through the conscious mind. But there's work to be done - and discovery to be made. — 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

Life Lessons by Edward Albee

1. Edward Albee's plays often explore the complexity of human relationships, emphasizing the importance of communication and honesty in order to build meaningful connections.
2. Through his work, Albee encourages us to confront our own mortality and to make the most of our time on earth by living life to the fullest.
3. Albee's plays also remind us that life is unpredictable and that we should be prepared to accept and adapt to change.