A Quote by Lee Daniels

My earliest experience was reading Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' at 8, you know, with a bunch of kids on my steps - on the stoops - and knowing that I wanted to direct them saying the lines. I don't really know how to articulate that 'cause there wasn't someone to show me.
As an actor, to go and see those shows - great plays like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and Clifford Odets's 'Golden Boy' - it's so exhilarating. I'd personally love to perform the role of Jerry in Edward Albee's 'The Zoo Story.' He's a transient, lost soul, and an example of humanity at its rawest.
The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learned from Virginia Woolf more than I even know how to articulate.
I never wanted my kids to have the experience of not knowing me or where they came from. I never want them to wonder, 'Did he love me?' I want to be there at the pivotal moments, for them to know how proud I am of who they are becoming.
The only thing I know that makes me feel comfortable is to know as much as I can. Not like what the shots are going to be, but knowing enough about my character that I can forget those things. And more specifically, my lines. I have to know my lines. I have to know something really well, so I can forget it when we're doing it. And there is comfort in knowing, "Okay, there's not another stone that I could have overturned."
I guess we all feel like underdogs. I remember being a freshman at Brown University and not knowing what a WASP was. We were reading an Edward Albee play, and - it was just a moment of accepting, certainly that I wasn't very worldly, but also that a lot of the plays that I'd been reading, let's say other kinds of family plays, were speaking a foreign language.
Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions.
How are you going to protect me?? do you even know what it means to protect someone?? you think giving a crying person icecream is a way of comforting or protecting them?!?! you don't even know anything! you don't know how to love someone, you don't know how to show love, and you don't know what it means to protect someone. you hurt people without realizing it
Some people never learn how to talk to kids. They turn up the volume and enunciate with extra care, as if talking to a partially deaf immigrant. They sound as if they're reading lines somebody else wrote for them, or as if what they're saying is really for the benefit of other adults listening and not just for the child. Kids sense that and turn off.
Patrick Swayze was in an acting class with me. We were working on Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf together, and there was this beautiful blonde who was playing Honey - and I'm playing loudmouthed Martha - and she was so gorgeous, and the two guys were flirting and having fun with her, and so I started crying. Buddy came over and said, "Don't you know that you're beautiful? Don't you know that these women are beautiful?" It meant so much to me, because he was already sort of a star.
Knowing how to swim doesn't come from someone else showing you or someone else telling you or watching movies of other people swimming. It comes from having been in the water, knowing how to move yourself through the water and not sink. And it's true of virtually everything in our lives: knowing comes from direct experience.
I love reading other people's diaries, especially someone like Virginia Woolf's - such a formidable woman that it's a revelation when she shows you a more vulnerable side of herself.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Edward Albee, the premier dark playwright of the American theater, would show up at rehearsal and quote his favorite lines from 'Auntie Mame'. He would stand at the back of the theater, not facing the stage, and sort of conduct the music of his play.
I write songs when I need to. That's how I write songs: when there's something that's bugging me. If something's troubling me, and I don't really know how to articulate it to people directly - my friends, my family, or my girlfriend - then I'll write a song about it because I know I can articulate it that way.
My parents took me to see plays, starting from when I was very little. Oftentimes, I was too young to understand. I don't know what my parents were thinking - 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' when I was eight years old, that kind of thing. So lots of times, I didn't understand what was going on, but I just loved the sound of dialogue.
In school, I was Martha in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' I loved that.
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