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

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Play, Findings

• 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

• 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

• 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

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