Sourced

• What I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing-cards when you're a kid, and pornographic playing-cards when you're older. It's that when you're a kid you use the cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when you're older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.
  • The Zoo Story (1959).

• I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humour.
  • Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1961)

• The gods too are fond of a joke.
  • Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1961)

• You gotta have a swine to show you where the truffles are.
  • Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1961)

• 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.
  • On his play Tiny Alice, in National Observer (5 April 1965)

• I'm not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, I'm rather happy to say — it leaves me something to do.
  • On his play Tiny Alice, in National Observer (5 April 1965)

• 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.
  • Saturday Review (4 May 1966)

• A play is fiction — and fiction is fact distilled into truth.
  • The New York Times (18 September 1966)

• 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.
  • The New York Times (18 September 1966)

• What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.
  • Quote (4 June 1967)

• American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.
  • Address to New York Cultural League (6 May 1969)

Unsourced

• A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

• I have been both overpraised and underpraised. I assume by the time I finish writing — and I plan to go on writing until I'm ninety or gaga — it will all equal itself out... You can't involve yourself with the vicissitudes of fashion or critical response.

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

• The difference between critics and audiences is that one is a group of humans and one is not.

• 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.

• Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.

• The only time I'll get good reviews is if I kill myself.

Criticism

• It is three and a half hours long, four characters wide and a cesspool deep.
  • John Chapman on Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in The New York Daily News (15 October 1962)