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
has-beens rare-things
It's a rare thing not to have been bonny-- once.
thinking goes-on waiting-for-godot
ESTRAGON: I can't go on like this. VLADIMIR: That's what you think.
perseverance trying failing
Try again. Fail again. Try better.
originality said
All has not been said and never will be.
moving past hands
I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side. (Pause. Krapp's lips move. No sound.) Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.
guarantees dull lightning
Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence.
play
I cannot explain my plays. Each must find out for himself what is meant
long water forever
The essential is never to arrive anywhere, never to be anywhere. The essential is to go on squirming forever at the edge of the line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening in heaven a sporting God to plague his creature, per pro his chosen shits. I've swallowed three hooks and am still hungry. Hence the howls. What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there. Nothing to do but strech out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for eternity.
eye shadow looks
I asked her to look at me and after a few moments - (pause) - after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low) Let me in.
breathing greedy given
Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy.
saving-up age said
How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life.
names eggs phantoms
In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg. Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?
misery enough pauses
Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.
looks misery speechless
You would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.