"How to read writers on writing: With respect, amusement, and skepticism. They will contradict one another-as they should-for each writer brings an individual history to the writing task. There is no single theology here."

Next Quote

About four years ago I made a list, for my own amusement, of the playwrights, the contemporary playwrights, by whom critics said I'd been influenced. I listed twenty-five. It included five playwrights whose work I didn't know, so I read these five playwrights and indeed now I suppose I can say I have been influenced by them. The problem is that the people who write these articles find the inevitable similarities of people writing in the same generation, in the same century, and on the same planet, and they put them together in a group.

— Edward Albee