Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?

By Some Curious Mischance, A Couple Of My Plays Managed To Hit An Area Where Commercial Success Was Feasible. But It's Wrong To Think I'm A Commercial Playwright Who Has Somehow Ceased His Proper Function. I Have Always Been The Same Thing - Which Is Not A Commercial Playwright. I'm Not After The Brass Ring.

American Critics Are Like American Universities. They Both Have Dull And Half-dead Faculties.

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.

In The Thirties A Whole School Of Criticism Bogged Down Intellectually In Those Agitprop, Social-realistic Days. A Play Had To Be Progressive. A Number Of Plays By Playwrights Who Were Thought Very Highly Of Then - They Were Very Bad Playwrights - Were Highly Praised Because Their Themes Were Intellectually And Politically Proper. This Intellectual Morass Is Very Dangerous, It Seems To Me. A Form Of Censorship.

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.