Top 90 Edward Albee Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.”

— Edward Albee

2. “If you’re willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.”

— Edward Albee

3. “Any definition which limits us is deplorable.”

— Edward Albee

4. “Every monster was a man first.”

— Edward Albee

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

5. “Creativity is magic. Don’t examine it too closely.”

— Edward Albee

6. “You’re alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn’t lived it?”

— Edward Albee

7. “Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested.”

— Edward Albee

8. “Sincerity doesn’t mean anything. A person can be sincere and be more destructive than a person who is insincere.”

— Edward Albee

9. “Musical beds is the faculty sport around here.”

— Edward Albee

10. “Martha: Oh, I like your anger. I think that’s what I like about you most. Your anger.”

— Edward Albee

11. “That’s the happiest moment. When it’s all done. When we stop. When we can stop.”

— Edward Albee

12. “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

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

— Edward Albee

14. “Awww, ’tis the refuge we take when the unreality of the world weighs too heavy on our tiny heads.”

— Edward Albee

15. “All serious art is being destroyed by commerce. Most people don’t want art to be disturbing. They want it to be escapist. I don’t think art should be escapist. That’s a waste of time.”

— Edward Albee

16. “Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end.”

— Edward Albee

17. “The greatest problem with Irish Wolfhounds, though, is that they don’t live very long: their great hearts give out. A good deal of this is genetic, of course, but I think it is in part that they worry so for us, care so much.”

— Edward Albee

18. “A writer is a controlled schizophrenic.”

— Edward Albee

19. “Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be.”

— Edward Albee

20. “It is a lazy public which promotes a slothful and irresponsible theater.”

— Edward Albee

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

— Edward Albee

22. “The only time I’ll get good reviews is if I kill myself.”

— Edward Albee

23. “In a democracy you cannot stop public access to that art that will most misinform the people. You cannot stop people from being misinformed. But what you can do is to educate the people to the point that they will throw the rascals out.”

— Edward Albee

24. “Art has an obligation to offend.”

— Edward Albee

25. “If you have no wounds, how can you know if you’re alive?”

— Edward Albee

26. “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.”

— Edward Albee

Featured in: Fun Quotes

27. “Art should never try to be popular.”

— Edward Albee

28. “Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.”

— Edward Albee

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

— Edward Albee

30. “All plays are social comment to one extent or another.”

— Edward Albee

31. “I said I was impressed, Martha. I’m beside myself with jealousy. What do you want me to do, throw up?”

— Edward Albee

32. “You want to dance with me, angel tits?”

— Edward Albee

33. “First, I’ll kill the dog with kindness, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll just kill him.”

— Edward Albee

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

34. “I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves.”

— Edward Albee

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

— Edward Albee

36. “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.”

— Edward Albee

37. “A lot of people are confused by “hello.” A lot of people are confused by a lot of things they shouldn’t be confused by.”

— Edward Albee

38. “Anything you put in a play – any speech – has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along.”

— Edward Albee

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

— Edward Albee

40. “Arthur Miller once payed me a great compliment saying that my plays were ‘necessary.’ I will go one step further and say that Arthur’s plays are ‘essential’”

— Edward Albee

41. “I don’t like symbolism that hits you over the head. A symbol should not be a cymbal.”

— Edward Albee

42. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

— Edward Albee

43. “Very few people who met my adoptive mother in the last 20 years of her life could abide her, while many people who have seen my play find her fascinating. Heavens, what have I done?!”

— Edward Albee

44. “There is chaos behind the civility, of course.”

— Edward Albee

45. “Alright... what do you want me to say? Do you want me to say it’s funny, so you can contradict me and say it’s sad? Or do you want me to say it’s sad so you can turn around and say no, it’s funny. You can play that damn little game any way you want to, you know!”

— Edward Albee

46. “Death is release, if you’ve lived all right.”

— Edward Albee

47. “All of my plays are about people missing the boat, closing down too young, coming to the end of their lives with regret at things not done, as opposed to things done. II find most people spend too much time living as if they’re never going to die.”

— Edward Albee

48. “When a critic sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the manner of a work, he is no longer a critic; he is a censor.”

— Edward Albee

49. “Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.”

— Edward Albee

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

— Edward Albee