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
When a play enters my consciousness, is already a fairly well-developed fetus. I don't put down a word until the play seems ready to be written.
I’m infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life.
There are always going to be more actors than anybody can ever use.
First, I'll kill the dog with kindness, and if that doesn't work, I'll just kill him.
Anything you put in a play -- any speech -- has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along.
There are lots of young vital playwrights who are experimenting, and these are the plays that people who are interested in the theatre should see. They should go off Broadway. They should go to the cafe theatres and see the experiments that are being made.
I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, [so] I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.
I don't think I've ever written about me. I'm not a character in any of my plays, except that boy, that silent boy that turns up in Three Tall Women.
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.
That's the happiest moment. When it's all done. When we stop. When we can stop.
I think that's foolishness on the part of the playwright to write about himself. People don't know anything about themselves.
Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end.
You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.
Audiences and, to a large extent, critics who want less from theater than it is possible for it to give. If everybody's encouraged to want less, you'll end up with less.