Edward Albee
Edward Albee
Edward Franklin Albee IIIis an American playwright known for works such as The Zoo Story, The Sandbox, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. His works are often considered as well-crafted, realistic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. Younger American playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, credit Albee's daring mix of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth12 March 1928
CountryUnited States of America
Edward Albee quotes about
The most profound indication of social malignancy ... no sense of humor. None of the monoliths could take a joke.
Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process--it is, after all, black magic.
I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.
What happens in a play is determined to a certain extent by what I thought might be interesting to have happen before I invented the characters, before they started taking over what happened, because they are three-dimensional individuals, and I cannot tell them what to do. Once I give them their identity and their nature, they start writing the play.
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.
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.
Maybe it's a little more pertinent now since the whole concept of evolution is being questioned by the know-nothing Republican right. Yes, maybe the play's a little more pertinent now.
To write a play one must be born a playwright. Otherwise, you're starting at a huge disadvantage.
Being different is ... interesting; there's 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.
Death is release, if you've lived all right.
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.
The government is far more interested in taking, in regulated taking, than in promoting spontaneous generosity.
I am a Doctor. A.B... M.A... PH.D... ABMAPHID! Abmaphid has been variously described as a wasting disease of the frontal lobes, and as a wonder drug. It is actually both.
All plays are social comment to one extent or another.