Edward Albee

"You need great precision in the way the words are delivered, and in the way the emotions are understood. If you start leaving out words or putting them in or coming in on the wrong bit it spoils it. But Albee understands that when you are playing a play its very important that its naturalistic on the surface. That it is like jazz. If the actors are playing well together, you have the structure, you have the beats, but you maybe play it a bit differently every night."

"Q: Do you find quite a difference between the audience at large and the critics as a group? A: Well, one is a group of human beings, one is not."

"If Attila the Hun were alive today, hed be a drama critic."

"Ive noticed that there is not necessarily a great relationship between what the majority of critics have to say and what is actually true. Some of them are so busy trying to mold the public taste according to the limits of their perceptions, and others are so busy reflecting what they consider to be the public taste — that view limited again by their perception. You find very few critics who approach their job with a combination of information and enthusiasm and humility that makes for a good critic. But there is nothing wrong with critics as long as people dont pay any attention to them. I mean, nobody wants to put them out of a job and a good critic is not necessarily a dead critic. Its just that people take what a critic says as a fact rather than an opinion, and you have to know whether the opinion of the critic is informed or uninformed, intelligent or stupid — but most people dont take the trouble."

"I survive almost any onslaught with a shrug, which must appear as arrogance, but really isnt because Im not an arrogant person. 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. Thats all. And then you go about your business, assuming youd be the first to know if your talent has collapsed. I dont think Ive been a commercial playwright ever. By some curious mischance, a couple of my plays managed to hit an area where commercial success was feasible. But its wrong to think Im a commercial playwright who has somehow ceased his proper function. I have always been the same thing — which is not a commercial playwright. Im not after the brass ring. I very seldom get it anyway, and then its accidental when I do. … So I write those things that interest me."

"Primarily the characters must seem interested in what they, themselves, are doing and saying. While the lines must not read metronome-exact, I feel that a certain set rhythm will come about, quite of itself. No one rushes in on the end of anyone elses speech; no one waits too long. I have indicated, quite precisely, within the speeches of the Long-Winded Lady, by means of commas, periods, semi-colons, colons, dashes and dots (as well as parenthetical stage directions) the speech rhythms. Please observe them carefully, for they were not thrown in, like herbs on a salad, to be mixed about. I have underlined words I want stressed. I have capitalized for loudness, and used exclamation points for emphasis. There are one or two seeming questions that I have left the question mark off of. This was done o purpose, as an out-loud reading will make self-evident."

"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."

"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."

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

"Im not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, Im rather happy to say — it leaves me something to do."

"What I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing-cards when youre a kid, and pornographic playing-cards when youre older. Its that when youre a kid you use the cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when youre older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy."

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