Edward Albee, distinguished playwright, perhaps most famous for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that spawned the classic 1966 movie, gave a question and answer session at Sofia University on October 12. He is in Sofia to see the Bulgarian version of his play "The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?" written in 2002.

Age certainly has not diminished Albee's mental sharpness. He may be somewhat frail and hard-of-hearing but he's quick-witted – a little impatient even – with a fierce stare and basilisk grin, ready to pounce on daft questions. "Please don't ask me what my play is about. That's the type of question I hate the most. If I can tell you that in two sentences the play would be just that – two sentences," he says.

Perhaps most surprisingly in view of his surroundings, Albee revealed he was thrown out of university – "I'm now a distinguished professor of drama who never graduated from university," he says, noting the irony.

Albee, now 81, started writing when he was eight years old: "My poetry wasn't bad but it wasn't really good enough to call myself a poet. As a teenager I wrote two novels and no American teenager could have written two worse novels. I set the American novel back 100 years," he says.

He moved to Greenwich Village in New York in the 1950s. By then he described himself as "a failed poet, novelist and short story writer". While delivering telegrams for Western Union, Albee wrote his first play, the Zoo Story, ironically staged for the first time in West Berlin on a double bill with Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. When the play became a success, Albee quit his job.

He's now written 30 plays and claims to be proud of them all, even the critical and commercial failures. "There's no relationship between quality and popularity," says Albee. "Public taste is no arbiter of quality. The best art is not necessarily the most popular. A play should be an act of aggression against the status quo. The suspension of disbelief in the theatre – when it happens – is so extraordinary, more so than in films or TV."

Albee is known for his leftist political views (he was a great friend of Harold Pinter, one of the original British "angry young men") and iconoclastic stances. He now describes himself as a "writer, director, teacher and political activist". He says he has learnt more from the European intelligentsia than American academics.

He has little time for frivolous entertainment and seems disdainful of most modern theatre. "All art must be useful. Didacticism alone is never enough but art should educate us in how we should be. Much of what I see is not intellectually stimulating and most of it doesn't teach me anything. Within 10 or 15 minutes I know what's wrong – perhaps it just isn't very well written. Plays should challenge the status quo, or at least our own values," he says. 

He stresses that that doesn't mean plays should be hectoring or dry. "A play is not an essay or a diatribe," he says. Quite the reverse, in fact. He prefers Chekhov to Ibsen, for example, because he believes the latter lacked humour in his writing. But, on the other hand, "a comedy that is just a series of jokes is a waste of time for me". Mere escapism doesn't enthral Albee. A good play should have a message but it need not be pretentiously packaged. "No playwright has ever been simpler than Beckett. He was clear and concise and he never put forward any idea that was not clearly comprehensible," says Albee.

Albee hit it big with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (which appeared in 1962) but, characteristically – since he's somewhat disdainful of commercial success per se – ("I'm not going to write differently to make a play more commercial. I didn't write plays to become a mere employee") he plays down its success, just as, conversely, he's liable to 'play up' some of his more obscure plays.

"The film version with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor was OK," says Albee, pronouncing the last two syllables with special emphasis as if to undercut his (very) qualified satisfaction. "At least each word in the movie was mine." (The screenplay was an abridged version)  "Originally, I was told the movie would star James Mason and Bette Davis, who were nearer to the ages of the characters in the play, but in the end they opted for Burton and Taylor because they were so famous. Taylor was quite good but not as good as Davis would have been. Two things I disliked about the movie. One was that it was in black and white – but in those days they always made 'serious' films in black and white; the other was that the film would have been much better without the music. I don't like music that warns me what to expect."

He preferred the movie adaptation of his play A Delicate Balance (produced in 1966) and filmed in 1973 with Paul Scofield and theatrical grande dame Katherine Hepburn.

Pressed to name his favourite plays, Albee refuses. They are all his children. "I've never written a play I don't like," he says. He tells his students to gamble when they write plays and advises them to read some bad plays. "I tell them to write as if it's the first play that's ever been written. Every time you write a play, don't just limit yourself to safe things. It's exciting to do things that you don't know how to do," he says.

As for the gestation of his plays – "I'll be going along minding my own business and I'll realise I've been thinking about it for a while – it forms in the unconscious," he says. Ever the perfectionist, he says he knows all about the background of his characters before and after their appearance in the play itself.

Albee hopes that his best work still lies ahead of him.