23 quotes
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.
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.
A play is fiction — and fiction is fact distilled into truth.
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.
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.
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.
Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.
The Zoo Story (1959)
I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humour.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1961)
You gotta have a swine to show you where the truffles are.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1961)
If Attila the Hun were alive today, he'd be a drama critic.
Theater Week (1988)
The only time I'll get good reviews is if I kill myself.
I created myself, and I'll attack anybody I feel like.
Fiction is fact distilled into truth.
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.
Unleashing Intellectual Capital (2000)
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'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.
When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions — that you have something to say, that you know how to say it, that it's worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride. That's all.
Conversations with Edward Albee (1988)
American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.
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.