Edward Albee is one of my favorite writers. Why? He takes chances. He's not afraid to go there. And if someone doesn't like his plays--so what? He's unapologetic.
I've seen him give a talk in Chicago a few years back. He's cocky, smart, and wickedly funny. He's also 79 and still writing great plays. Pretty impressive. I found some quotes (and advice) that I thought you may appreciate.
His thoughts on audience:
"I want them to start thinking about whether the stuff they think they believe is really what they believe. To reconsider their values. In The Goat, I want an audience to go there and not make value judgments about the lives of the characters, about what goat-fucking really means. I want them to imagine themselves being the characters in that situation. I don't want anybody to go into a play of mine and come out exactly the same person."
His thoughts on writing what you know (and a slam against Williams' The Glass Menagerie--which I'm sure some of you will appreciate):
"Don't write about yourself very much. . . . I'm one of the few people who think `The Glass Menagerie' would have been a better play without Tom. . . . The more you invent, the more freedom you have to get to the truths you're after."
His thoughts on why he writes:
"I write to find out what's going on in my head. I always have ideas for plays. They come into focus, and I write them down, and I know why I wrote them down. I usually have three or four plays swimming around in my head somewhere. I'm writing one right now, not this instant we're talking, but these days, and I have two others that are lined up, like aircraft waiting to get clearance to land, that are waiting to be written down. I don't examine the process terribly carefully, because I think it's dangerous to. As James Thurber said, let your mind alone. It knows what it's doing."
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