Edward Albee

“I swear, if you existed I'd divorce you.”

“It's a good idea to have friends both in Heaven and in Hell.”

“The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-swinging, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny. If you will approach it with childlike innocence - putting your standard responses aside, for they do not apply - if you will approach it on its own terms, I think you will be in for a liberating surprise.”

“My exposure to Beckett and to late O'Neill was probably important right at the time I gave up poetry and the novel.”

“Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don't know the difference.George: No, but we must carry on as though we did.Martha: Amen.”

“The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.”

“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.”

“That's all that counts. People being sorry. Makes you feel better; gives you a sense of dignity, and that's all that's important; a sense of dignity. And it doesn't matter if you don't care or not, either. You got to have a sense of dignity, even if you don't care, 'cause, if you don't have that, civilization's doomed.”

“Old people whimper, and cry, and belch, and make great hollow rumbling sounds at table; old people wake up in the middle of the night screaming, and find out they haven't even been asleep; and when old people are asleep, they try to wake up, and they can't... not for the longest time.”

“You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.”

“Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end; and I am at just the very beginning of what I hope will be a long and satisfying life in the theater. But, whatever happens, I am grateful to have had my novice work received so well, and so quickly.”

“I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.”

“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.”

“If Attila the Hun were alive today, he'd be a drama critic.”

“To all of you who have made my being alive so wonderful, so exciting and so full, my thanks and all my love.”

“I write to find out what I'm talking about.”

“A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.”

“I am convinced that no one is fully educated without a full grounding in the arts.”

“American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.”

“Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve.”