Edward Albee Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.

  Edward Albee

  Book, Writing, Reality

  Edward Albee (2009). “Stretching My Mind: The Collected Essays of Edward Albee”, p.48, Da Capo Press

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

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Talking

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

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Play, Long

  Edward Albee (2009). “Stretching My Mind: The Collected Essays of Edward Albee”, p.165, Da Capo Press

• 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

  Writing, Optimism, Matter

• 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

  Writing, Character, People

  The New York Times, September 18, 1966.

• 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.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Play, Fetus

• I'm back in fashion again for a while now. But I imagine that three or four years from now I'll be out again. And in another fifteen years I'll be back. If you try to write to stay in fashion, if you try to write to be the critics' darling, you become an employee.

  Edward Albee

  Fashion, Writing, Years

• 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

  Truth, Writing, Reality

  Edward Albee (2009). “Stretching My Mind: The Collected Essays of Edward Albee”, p.48, Da Capo Press

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

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Discovery, Findings

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.61, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• When I'm writing a play I hear it like music. I use the same indications that a composer does for duration. There's a difference, I tell my students, between a semi-colon and a period. A difference in duration. And we have all these wonderful things, we use commas and underlining and all the wonderful punctuation things we can use in the same way a composer uses them in music. And we can indicate, as specifically as a composer, the way we want our piece to sound.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Play, Differences

• What happens in a play is determined to a certain extent by what I thought might be interesting to have happen before I invented the characters, before they started taking over what happened, because they are three-dimensional individuals, and I cannot tell them what to do. Once I give them their identity and their nature, they start writing the play.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Character, Play

  Interview with Linda Leseman, www.believermag.com. September, 2013.

• Each time I sit down and write a play I try to dismiss from my mind as much as I possibly can the implications of what I've done before, what I'm going to do, what other people think about my work, the failure or success of the previous play. I'm stuck with a new reality that I've got to create.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Reality, Thinking

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.56, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• To a certain extent I imagine a play is completely finished in my mind - in my case, at any rate - without my knowing it, before I sit down to write.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Play, Knowing

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.61, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• The responsibility of the writer is to be a sort of demonic social critic -- to present the world and people in it as he sees it and say, "Do you like it? If you don't like it, change it.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Responsibility, People

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.36, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Two, Life And Death

• Within a year after I write a play I forget the experience of having written it. And I couldn't revise or rewrite it if I wanted to. Up until that point, I'm so involved with the experience of having written the play, and the nature of it, that I can't see what faults it might have. The only moment of clear objectivity that I can find is at the moment of critical heat - of self-critical heat when I'm actually writing.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Self, Objectivity

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.57, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• I suppose, writing a play is finding out what the play is.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Play, Findings

• I think that's foolishness on the part of the playwright to write about himself. People don't know anything about themselves.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Thinking, People

  The Believer Interview, www.believermag.com. September 2013.

• It's the function of a playwright to write. Some playwrights write a large number of plays, some write a small number.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Small Numbers, Play

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.47, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• Sometimes I think the experience of a play is finished for me when I finish writing it. If it weren't for the need to make a living, I don't know whether I'd have the plays produced.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Thinking, Play

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.57, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• I usually think about a play anywhere from six months to a year and a half before I sit down to write it out.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Thinking, Years

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.61, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• Writing should be useful. If it can’t instruct people a little bit more about the responsibilities of consciousness, there’s no point in doing it.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Responsibility, People

  "http://www.achievement.org/achiever/edward-albee/#interview". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 2, 2005.

• 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.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Years, Play

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.49, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• I don't set out to write a play a year. Sometimes I've written two plays a year. There was a period of a year and half when I only wrote half a play. If it depresses some critics that I seem prolific, well, that's their problem as much as mine.

  Edward Albee

  Depressing, Writing, Play

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.47, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• In the two or three or four months that it takes me to write a play, I find that the reality of the play is a great deal more alive for me than what passes for reality. I'm infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life. The involvement is terribly intense.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Character, Reality

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.57, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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