Quotes by Edward Albee

“You gotta have a swine to show you where the truffles are.”

“One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.”

“I'm not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, I'm rather happy to say — it leaves me something to do.”

“A play is fiction — and fiction is fact distilled into truth.”

“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.”

“What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.”

“American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.”

“Q: Do you find quite a difference between the audience at large and the critics as a group? A: Well, one is a group of human beings, one is not.”

“I've noticed that there is not necessarily a great relationship between what the majority of critics have to say and what is actually true. Some of them are so busy trying to mold the public taste ...”

“I have been both overpraised and underpraised. I assume by the time I finish writing — and I plan to go on writing until I'm 90 or gaga — it will all equal itself out... You can't involve yourself ...”

“I survive almost any onslaught with a shrug, which must appear as arrogance, but really isn't because I'm not an arrogant person. When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions — that you hav...”

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

“I created myself, and I'll attack anybody I feel like.”

“Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.”

“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.”

“The only time I'll get good reviews is if I kill myself.”

“The gods too are fond of a joke.”

“It is three and a half hours long, four characters wide and a cesspool deep.”

“I remember two playwrights who affected me deeply, for their wit especially: Edward Albee and Samuel Beckett. I found their sense of absurdity comforting.”

“You need great precision in the way the words are delivered, and in the way the emotions are understood. If you start leaving out words or putting them in or coming in on the wrong bit it spoils it...”