264 Quotes by Edward Albee

I think there are perhaps four playwrights of the 20th century that we could not have done without: Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht and Beckett. If you've got those four, you've got the century covered.

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.

I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves.

that my plays were 'necessary.' I will go one step further and say that Arthur's plays are 'essential.'

It's hard to explain, or even remember, it now. All four of them were down there underwater, but it's too complicated to go into. I thought it was better just to eliminate it. If it had been necessary, I wouldn't have been able to cut it so easily. It still exists. It's probably in The Theatre Collection of The New York Public Library, but it can't be performed.

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.

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

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

I don't like symbolism that hits you over the head. A symbol should not be a cymbal.