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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Edward Albee Quotes

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

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

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

– Edward Albee

Never marry for money; you can borrow it cheaper.

– Edward Albee

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

– Edward Albee

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

– 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

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

– 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

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

– 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

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

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

– Edward Albee

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

– 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

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

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

– 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

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

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

– 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

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

– Edward Albee

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

– Edward Albee