Top 197 Quotes & Sayings by Edward Albee

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American dramatist Edward Albee.

Last updated on April 14, 2025.

Edward Franklin Albee III was an American playwright known for works such as The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), A Delicate Balance (1966), and Three Tall Women (1994). Some critics have argued that some of his work constitutes an American variant of what Martin Esslin identified and named the Theater of the Absurd. Three of his plays won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and two of his other works won the Tony Award for Best Play.

American - Dramatist | March 12, 1928 - September 16, 2016

Source: Wikipedia

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

Edward Albee

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.

Edward Albee

I am convinced that no one is fully educated without a full grounding in the arts.

Edward Albee

The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-swinging, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny. If you will approach it with childlike innocence - putting your standard responses aside, for they do not apply - if you will approach it on its own terms, I think you will be in for a liberating surprise.

Edward Albee

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.

Edward Albee

My exposure to Beckett and to late O'Neill was probably important right at the time I gave up poetry and the novel.

Edward Albee

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.

Edward Albee

The difference between critics and audiences is that one is a group of humans and one is not.

Edward Albee

Old people whimper, and cry, and belch, and make great hollow rumbling sounds at table; old people wake up in the middle of the night screaming, and find out they haven't even been asleep; and when old people are asleep, they try to wake up, and they can't... not for the longest time.

Edward Albee

The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.

Edward Albee

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

Edward Albee

A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

Edward Albee

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

Edward Albee

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.

Edward Albee

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

Edward Albee

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.

Edward Albee

That's all that counts. People being sorry. Makes you feel better; gives you a sense of dignity, and that's all that's important; a sense of dignity. And it doesn't matter if you don't care or not, either. You got to have a sense of dignity, even if you don't care, 'cause, if you don't have that, civilization's doomed.

Edward Albee

Never marry for money; you can borrow it cheaper.

Edward Albee

I swear, if you existed I'd divorce you.

Edward Albee

Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.

Edward Albee

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.

Edward Albee

It's a good idea to have friends both in Heaven and in Hell.

Edward Albee

He that has been bitten by a snake is afraid of a rope.

Edward Albee

Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end; and I am at just the very beginning of what I hope will be a long and satisfying life in the theater. But, whatever happens, I am grateful to have had my novice work received so well, and so quickly.

Edward Albee

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

Edward Albee

The function of art is to bring people into greater touch with reality, and yet our movie houses and family rooms are jammed with people after as much reality-removal as they can get.

Edward Albee

All serious art is being destroyed by commerce. Most people don't want art to be disturbing. They want it to be escapist. I don't think art should be escapist. That's a waste of time.

Edward Albee

I write to find out what I'm talking about.

Edward Albee

Creativity is magic. Don't examine it too closely.

Edward Albee

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

Edward Albee

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

Edward Albee

It is not enough to hold the line against the dark. It is your responsibility to lead into the light. People don't like the light--it reveals too much. But hand in hand with the creative artist, you can lead people into the wisdom that is known to all other animals: simply, that it is the dark we have to fear.

Edward Albee

I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.

Edward Albee

I think we should all live on the precipe of life, as fully and as dangerously as possible. Everyone should make the assumption that they're going through life only once. Tomorrow we die. Why not take chances, extend yourself? How awful it is when a person comes to the end of life full of regret.

Edward Albee

People often ask me how long it takes me to write a play, and I tell them 'all of my life.'

Edward Albee

Sincerity doesn't mean anything. A person can be sincere and be more destructive than a person who is insincere.

Edward Albee

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

Edward Albee

Art should never try to be popular.

Edward Albee

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions.

Edward Albee

The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn't matter.

Edward Albee

The arts are the only things that separate us from the other animals. The arts are not decorative. ... They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves.

Edward Albee

A lot interests me - but nothing surprises me particularly.

Edward Albee

A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it.

Edward Albee

If you have no wounds, how can you know if you're alive?

Edward Albee

That's the happiest moment. When it's all done. When we stop. When we can stop.

Edward Albee

I am sick of the disparity between things as they are and as they should be. I'm tired.I'm tired of the truth and I'm tired of lying about the truth.

Edward Albee

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.

Edward Albee

There are only two things to write about: life and death.

Edward Albee

Writing has got to be an act of discovery. Finding out things about what one is writing about.

Edward Albee

A play is fiction and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

Edward Albee

School curricula that ignore the arts produce highly educated Barbarians

Edward Albee

I think I was probably wondering, having looked at human beings for a long time, wondering if evolution ever took place. And I still have my doubts.

Edward Albee

You're alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it?

Edward Albee

What I mean by an educated taste is someone who has the same tastes that I have.

Edward Albee

Art has an obligation to offend

Edward Albee

I think you remember everything ... you just can't bring it to mind all the time.

Edward Albee

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.

Edward Albee

If you're willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.

Edward Albee

The condition of the theater is always an accurate measure of the cultural health of a nation. A play always exists in the present tense (if it is a valuable one), and its music -- its special noise -- is always contemporary. The most valuable function of the theater as an art form is to tell us who we are, and the health of the theater is determined by how much of that we want to know.

Edward Albee

Why we are here is an impenetrable question.

Edward Albee

Top 197 Quotes & Sayings by Edward Albee

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