264 Quotes by 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.

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

To write a play one must be born a playwright. Otherwise, you're starting at a huge disadvantage.

The playwright, along with any writer, composer, painter in this society, has got to have a terribly private view of his own value, of his own work. He's got to listen to his own voice primarily. He's got to watch out for fads, for what might be called the critical aesthetics.

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.

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

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.

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

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.