Beckett Quotes

• Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.

  Samuel Beckett

  Unhappiness, Endgame

  Samuel Beckett (2009). “Endgame and Act Without Words”, p.26, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• I don't think there's been any writer like Samuel Beckett. He's unique. He was a most charming man and I used to send him my plays.

  Harold Pinter

  Unique, Men, Thinking

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• All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

  Samuel Beckett

  Beauty, Long, Phrases

  Samuel Beckett (2007). “Molloy”, p.32, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• It's so nice to know where you're going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.

  Samuel Beckett

  Nice, Wish, Stage

  Samuel Beckett (2007). “I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader”, p.242, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

  Samuel Beckett

  Alternatives, Sun, Murphy

  Samuel Beckett (2007). “I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader”, p.71, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing.

  Anthony Burgess

  Believe, Unforgivable Sin, Doe

  Anthony Burgess (1971). “The Novel To-day”

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• Beckett had an unerring light on things, which I much appreciated.

  Harold Pinter

  Light, Literature, Appreciated

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• Where do I begin? I loved working with Kate Hepburn, which was one of the highlights of my life; Working with Richard Burton in Beckett was another great joy.

  Peter O'Toole

  Joy, Highlights, Kate

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• The first play I saw was a Samuel Beckett play which was great.

  Val Kilmer

  Play, Saws, Firsts

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• As Beckett said, it's not enough to die, one has to be forgotten as well.

  John Hurt

  Forgotten, Enough, Said

  Interview with Geoff Andrew, www.theguardian.com. April 27, 2000.

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• It is useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it.

  Samuel Beckett

  Rams, Useless, Want

  Samuel Beckett (2012). “Watt”, p.33, Faber & Faber

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• I belong to that generation who, as students, had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism. For me the break was first Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance.

  Michel Foucault

  Eye, Waiting, Generations

  Michel Foucault (2000). “Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel”, p.176, A&C Black

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• Throughout the 1960s and 1970s devoted Beckett readers greeted each successively shorter volume from the master with a mixture of awe and apprehensiveness; it was like watching a great mathematician wielding an infinitesimal calculus, his equations approaching nearer and still nearer to the null point.

  John Banville

  Math, Null, Mixtures

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• Kamby Bolongo Mean River is an original and fearless fiction. It bears genetic traces of Beckett and Stein, but Robert Lopez's powerful cadences and bleak, joyful wit are all his own.

  Sam Lipsyte

  Powerful, Mean, Rivers

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• We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime's rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively.

  Harold Bloom

  Past, Journey, Three

  Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Unfortunately, I'm not a history buff. I don't read biographies, except of some of those writers whom I've collected over the years - particularly Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller, people like Charles Bukowski and John Fante and David Foster Wallace.

  John Larroquette

  Years, People, Biographies

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• [Contemporary writer] could be a kind of [Samuel] Beckett who would not be felt to be totally committed to despair.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Despair, Kind, Committed

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• I went and saw him [ John Hurt ] here in L.A.He did a one-man Beckett show of Krapp's Last Tape. I went back and saw him afterwards, and what an actor he is. He is so gifted.

  Judd Nelson

  Hurt, Men, Tape

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Ibsen, Chekhov, Shakespeare, and Beckett to me are the most revolutionary.

  John Cameron Mitchell

  Revolutionary, Chekhov, Ibsen

  "Ruth Wilson". Interview with John Cameron Mitchell, www.interviewmagazine.com. October 31, 2016.

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• My son is actually named after Beck, the musician. We heard Beck on the radio and thought that was a good nickname for a child. We named our son Beckett so we could call him Beck - we reverse engineered. And then after he was born and I saw the name on the birth certificate I realized Beckett was a really pretentious name, way too literary. Luckily he's grown into it. We nearly named my second son Dashiell. Can you imagine? Beckett and Dashiell. It would have been a disaster of pretentiousness.

  Lauren Groff

  Children, Son, Musician

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• Food is a necessary component to life. People can live without Renoir, Mozart, Gaudi, Beckett, but they cannot live without food.

  Grant Achatz

  People, Renoir, Gaudi

  Interview with Michael Y. Park, www.epicurious.com. September 27, 2010.

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• Poets think in short lines. Unless you're Samuel Beckett, Twitter might be more difficult for novelists.

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Thinking, Novelists, Lines

  Source: logger.believermag.com

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• People ask me all the time, "What are your influences? Are you trying to do Beckett?" It's like, "No, I'm trying to do me." Whatever that is. I don't know what that is, but that's the basis. I'm trying to be true and I'm trying to be honest.

  Charlie Kaufman

  People, Trying, Honest

  "Charlie Kaufman" by Scott Tobias, www.avclub.com. October 22, 2008.

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• Gertrude Stein, all courage and will, is a soldier of minimalism. Her work, unlike the resonating silences in the art of Samuel Beckett, embodies in its loquacity and verbosity the curious paradox of the minimalist form. This art of the nuance in repetition and placement she shares with the orchestral compositions of Philip Glass.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Art, Glasses, Silence

  Elizabeth Hardwick (1998). “Sight-readings: American Fictions”, Random House Incorporated

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• I have 800 books of just Samuel Beckett's work, tons of his correspondence, personal letters that he wrote. I have copies of plays he used when he directed, so all of his handwritten notes are in the corners of the page.

  John Larroquette

  Book, Play, Letters

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