Recalling a dinner with T. S. Eliot: “He was wearing a cowboy hat, and we all got plastered … He couldn’t walk, for his ankles were crossed, so Valerie lifted him into the taxi.”

The interview happened on a scalding, soggy-aired Fourth of July in a sunny room in Albee’s small, attractive country house in Montauk, Long Island.

“I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can’t conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood.”

“I live in a grey world, rather like the silver screen world. But yellow stands out.”

“The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It’s as psychological as malaria. It’s a matter of exposure.”

“Savy, the biologist, said something appropriate: In the beginning there was emotion, and the verb wasn’t there at all. ”

“A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be.”

“Appreciation of art is a moral erection; otherwise mere dilettantism. I believe sexuality is the basis of all friendship.”

Describing the effect of hallucinatory drugs on the creative process: “[It’s] terrific! That’s at least what I’d like to say.”

“I’ve shown women as they are, as divided human beings, and not as they ought to be.”

“Our development and that of the Soviet Union have many things in common except that the Soviet Union is motivated by this tremendous desire for world conquest.”

“[Flaubert said] ‘If you want to describe courage, do not become a soldier; a lover, do not fall in love; a drunkard, do not drink wine.’ There is … a brilliant refutation of this theory: Stendhal.”

“… Why don't critics talk about those things—what a feat it was to turn that that way, and what a feat it was to remember that, to be reminded of that by this?”

“What happens if you make a distinction between what you tell your friends and what you tell your Muse?”

On the origins of Wife to Mr. Milton: “I'd always hated Milton, from earliest childhood, and I wanted to find out the reason. I found it. His jealousy. It's present in all his poems . . . ”

On the difficulties of writing about McCarthyism: “Few people acted large enough for drama and not pleasant enough for comedy.”

“Some people are born with an amazing gift for storytelling; it’s a gift which I’ve never had at all.”

“Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.”

“Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did.”

“I don’t know if I need seclusion, but I do like to be alone in a room.”

“Point of view is the problem that everybody’s been up against since Joyce, if not before. I think this technical development has become absolutely killing to the novel.”

“I believe in saying the truth, coming out with it cold, shocking if necessary, not disguising it. In other words, obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.”

“In the Greek audience, fourteen thousand people sat down at the same time, to see a play … And nobody can tell me that those people were all readers of the New York Review of Books!”

“I think the most difficult thing for me is to be satisfactorily lucid, yet have enough implication in the writing to suit myself.”

“I am as American as April in Arizona. The flora, the fauna, the air of the western states, are my links with Asiatic and Arctic Russia.”

“[With Dr. Zhivago] it seemed to me that it was my duty to make a statement about our epoch. I wanted to record the past and to honor the beautiful and sensitive aspects of the Russia of those years.”

“Writers who pontificate about their own use of language drive me right up the wall. In what spare time I have, I read the expert opinions of V. S. Pritchett and Edmund Wilson, who are to my mind the best-qualified authorities on the written English language.”

“The other night I watched some politicians on television talking about Vietnam. I wanted very much to burst through the screen with a flamethrower and burn their eyes out and their balls off and then inquire from them how they would assess this action from a political point of view.”

“Even Saint Teresa said, ‘I can pray better when I’m comfortable.’ I don’t think living in cellars and starving is any better for an artist than it is for anybody else.”

“It is doubtful whether the individual soul is going to be allowed to survive at all. Now you get a Buddhist movement with everything except Confucius taken into it.”

“I wonder what these people thought thousands of years ago of these sparks they saw when they took off their woolen clothes?”

“Writing to me is a deeply personal, even a secret function and when the product I turned loose it is cut off from me and I have no sense of its being mine. Consequently criticism doesn’t mean anything to me. As a disciplinary matter, it is too late.”

“When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas … ”

“An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition.”

“People are like animals and the city is full of people in strange plumage.”

“Eliot wanted to be regular, to be true to the American idiom, but he didn't find a way to do it. One has to bow down finally, either to the English or to the American.”

On the Day of Poetry, a Russian festival: “Moscovite poets assemble in front of a huge crowd of eight or ten thousand people. There have been years when snow fell that day, but the crowd did not disband; it stood listening in the storm.”