Edward Albee

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

Progress is a set of assumptions.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Never marry for money; you can borrow it cheaper.

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

Being different is ... interesting theres 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.

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.

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

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.

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

Any definition which limits us is deplorable.