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Edward Albee

Edward Albee Quotes

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Famous Edward Albee Quotes

“You find very few critics who approach their job with a combination of information and enthusiasm and humility that makes for a good critic. But there is nothing wrong with critics as long as people don't pay any attention to them. I mean, nobody wants to put them out of a job and a good critic is not necessarily a dead critic. It's just that people take what a critic says as a fact rather than an opinion, and you have to know whether the opinion of the critic is informed or uninformed, intelligent of stupid -- but most people don't take the trouble.”

PeopleKnowsWantMeanLongFactsJobsPayAttentionOpinionTroubleStupidInformationHumilityApproachCriticismIntelligentCriticsEnthusiasmCombinationUninformed
Book:Conversations with Edward Albee
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“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.”

WayWantWritingDoePlayUseSoundDifferencesPiecesWonderfulStudentsPeriodsComposerWonderful ThingsIndicationDurationPunctuationPlaywriting
Author:Edward Albee
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“The condition of the theater is always an accurate measure of the cultural health of a nation. A play always exists in the present tense (if it is a valuable one), and its music -- its special noise -- is always contemporary. The most valuable function of the theater as an art form is to tell us who we are, and the health of the theater is determined by how much of that we want to know.”

IfsKnowsWantArtPlayFormNationsSpecialConditionsFunctionTheaterValuableDeterminedTheatreContemporaryNoiseWho We AreAccurateTensePresent Tense
Book:Stretching My Mind: The Collected Essays of Edward Albee
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“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.”

IfsKnowsWantYearsLongSaidStillsCertainFallNextActorsActingStageMovementCollegeAmountTenLong TimeTwentiesBoringStuckThrownSuspectsGood ActorsNineteen
Book:Stretching My Mind: The Collected Essays of Edward Albee
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“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.”

IfsWayWantPersonsPlayCharacterEventsOne WayBehave
Author:Edward Albee
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