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

• 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.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Goes On, Assuming

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.176, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• There's always the danger that there are so damn many things that a playwright can examine in this society of ours - things that have less to do with his artistic work than have to do with the critical and aesthetic environment - that perhaps he does have to worry about whether or not he is writing too fast. But then also, perhaps he should worry about getting as many plays on as possible before the inevitable ax falls.

  Edward Albee

  Fall, Writing, Play

• I find that in the course of the day when I'm writing, after three or four hours of intense work, I have a splitting headache, and I have to stop. Because the involvement, which is both creative and self-critical, is so intense that I've got to stop doing it.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Self, Creative

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

• Usually, the way I write is to sit down at a typewriter after that year or so of what passes for thinking, and I write a first draft quite rapidly. Read it over. Make a few pencil corrections, where I think I've got the rhythms wrong in the speeches, for example, and then retype the whole thing. And in the retyping I discover that maybe one or two more speeches will come in. One or two more things will happen, but not much.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Thinking, Typewriters

• 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 its worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Play, Assumption

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.177, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• When I was fifteen I wrote seven hundred pages of an incredibly bad novel - it's a very funny book I still like a lot. Then, when I was nineteen I wrote a couple hundred pages of another novel, which wasn't very good either. I was still determined to be a writer. And since I was a writer, and here I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.

  Edward Albee

  Couple, Book, Writing

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

• If I've been accused a number of times of writing plays where the endings are ambivalent, indeed, that's the way I find life.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Play, Numbers

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

• I think I sit down to the typewriter when it's time to sit down to the typewriter. That isn't to suggest that when I do finally sit down at the typewriter, and write out my plays with a speed that seems to horrify all my detractors and half of my well-wishers, that there's no work involved. It is hard work, and one is doing all the work oneself.

  Edward Albee

  Hard Work, Writing, Thinking

• Well, when you write about people of a certain age ... we are in a postsexual situation. If I write about younger people then I write sexually, because their drive is sexual. It depends upon the circumstances.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, People, Age

  Edward Albee (2009). “Stretching My Mind: The Collected Essays of Edward Albee”, p.90, Da Capo Press

• I don't pay much attention to how the plays relate thematically to each other. I think that's very dangerous to do, because in the theater one is self-conscious enough without planning ahead or wondering about the thematic relation from one play to the next. One hopes that one is developing, and writing interestingly, and that's where it should end, I think.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Thinking, Self

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.54, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• If a man writes a brilliant enough play in praise of something that is universally loathed, the play, if it is good and well enough written, should not be knocked down because of its approach to its subject.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Men, Play

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.60, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• Writing has got to be an act of discovery....I write to find out what I'm thinking about.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Thinking, Discovery

• To write a play one must be born a playwright. Otherwise, you're starting at a huge disadvantage.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Play, Starting

• About four years ago I made a list, for my own amusement, of the playwrights, the contemporary playwrights, by whom critics said I'd been influenced. I listed twenty-five. It included five playwrights whose work I didn't know, so I read these five playwrights and indeed now I suppose I can say I have been influenced by them. The problem is that the people who write these articles find the inevitable similarities of people writing in the same generation, in the same century, and on the same planet, and they put them together in a group.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Years, People

• Naturally, no writer who's any good at all would sit down and put a sheet of paper in a typewriter and start typing a play unless he knew what he was writing about.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Typewriters, Play

  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.

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