Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckettwas a French-Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. He is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth13 April 1906
CityFoxrock, Ireland
CountryIreland
knowledge knowing pessimism
Enough to know no knowing.
bible athlete writing
I've tried not to exaggerate the glory of athletes. I'd rather, if I could, preserve a sense of proportion, to write about them asexcellent ballplayers, first-rate players. But I'm sure I have contributed to false values--as Stanley Woodward said, "Godding up those ballplayers." The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
writing want ends
I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end.
records lasts realizing
My notes have a curious tendency, as I realize at last, to annihilate all they purport to record.
dark reality lasts
Clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most
mind pennies hell
That penny farthing hell you call your mind
hideous
How hideous is the semicolon.
stupid book writing
I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them. *1937
done
Estragon: Nothing to be done.
years yesterday track
Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.
ends knows
I knew it would soon be the end, so I played the part, you know, the part of — how shall I say, I don’t know.
creation
What was God doing with himself before the creation?
simple light needs
It is better to adopt the simplest explanation, even if it is not simple, even if it does not explain very much. A bright light is not necessary, a taper is all one needs to live in strangeness, if it faithfully burns.
taken yesterday mood
There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place.