Edward Albee

When one controls form, one doesn\'t do it with a stopwatch or a graph. One does it by sensing, again intuitively.

I said I was impressed, Martha. I\'m beside myself with jealousy. What do you want me to do, throw up?

Some things that make sense to me don\'t make the same degree of sense to other people.

A rather ugly thing starts happening: the playwright finds himself knocked down for works that quite often are just as good or better than the works he\'s been praised for previously. And a lot of playwrights become confused by this and they start doing imitations of what they\'ve done before, or they try to do something entirely different, in which case they get accused by the same critics of not doing what they used to do so well.

In rehearsals I get so completely wrapped up with the reality that\'s occurring on stage that by the time the play has opened I\'m not usually quite as aware of the distinctions between what I\'d intended and the result. There are many ways of getting the same result.

A play is a parenthesis that contains all the material you think has to be contained for the action of the play. Where do you end that? Where the characters seem to come to a pause... where they seem to want to stop - rather like, I would think, the construction of a piece of music.

I think it\'s for the critics to decide whether or not their loathing of the play is based on something other than the play\'s merits or demerits. They must search their own souls, or whatever.

I imagine as an axiom you could say that the better the play, the less \"creativity\" the director need exert.

If you examine the history of any playwright of the past twenty - five or thirty years - I\'m not talking about the comedy boys, I\'m talking about the more serious writers - it seems inevitable that almost every one has been encouraged until the critics feel that they have built them up beyond the point where they can control them; then it\'s time to knock them down again.

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.

Curiously enough, the only two plays that I\'ve done very much revision on were the two adaptations - even though the shape of them was pretty much determined by the original work. With my own plays, the only changes, aside from taking a speech out here, putting one in there (if I thought I dwelled on a point a little too long or didn\'t make it explicit enough), are very minor; but even though they\'re very minor - having to do with the inability of actors or the unwillingness of the director to go along with me - I\'ve always regretted them.

If you intellectualize and examine the creative process too carefully it can evaporate and vanish. It\'s not only terribly difficult to talk about, it\'s also dangerous.

I do not invent characters. There they are. That\'s who they are. That\'s their nature. They talk and they behave the way they want to behave. I don\'t have a character behaving one way, then a point comes in the play where the person has to either stay or leave. If I had it plotted that the person leaves, then the person leaves. If that\'s what the person wants to do. I let the person do what the person wants or has to do at the time of the event.

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.

To a certain extent I imagine a play is completely finished in my mind - in my case, at any rate - without my knowing it, before I sit down to write.

I know playwrights who like to kid themselves into saying that their characters are so well formed that they just take over. They determine the structure of the play. By which is meant, I suspect, only that the unconscious mind has done its work so thoroughly that the play just has to be filtered through the conscious mind. But there\'s work to be done - and discovery to be made.

If the work of art is good enough, it must not be criticized for its theme. I don\'t think it can be argued.

My sense of reality and logic is different from most people\'s.

I\'ve seen an awful lot of plays that I\'d read before they were put into production and been shocked by what\'s happened to them. In the attempt to make them straightforward and commercially successful, a lot of things go out the window.

There are two things that a playwright can have. Success or failure. I imagine there are dangers in both. Certainly the danger of being faced with indifference or hostility is discouraging, and it may be that success - acceptance if it\'s too quick, too lightning-quick - can turn the heads of some people.

I do think, or rather I sense that there is a relationship - at least in my own work - between a dramatic structure, the form and sound and shape of a play, and the equivalent structure in music. Both deal with sound, of course, and also with idea, theme.

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.

You...you\'ve been here quite a long time, haven\'t you?\" What? Oh...yes. Ever since I married What\'s-her-name. Uh, Martha. Even before that. Forever. Dashed hopes, and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested. How do you like that for a declension, young man?

If the playwright is strong enough to hold on to reasonable objectivity in the face of either hostility or praise, he\'ll do his work the way he was going to anyway.

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.

Some writers\' view of things depends upon the success of the final result. I\'d rather stand or fall on my own concepts. But there is a fine line to be drawn between pointing up something or distorting it.

The final evaluation of a play has nothing to do with immediate audience or critical response.

The notion that women are less aesthetically profound and innovative than men--just not very important, if you know what I mean--doubtless spreads back to our beginnings as upright animals: the males hunted and killed for the family while the females stayed home in the cave and tended the strange little creatures they were giving birth to.

When you\'re dealing with a symbol in a realistic play, it is also a realistic fact. You must expect the audience\'s mind to work on both levels, symbolically and realistically. But we\'re trained so much in pure, realistic theater that it\'s difficult for us to handle things on two levels at the same time.

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.