Beckett Quotes - Page 2

• According to Beckett's or Kafka's law, there is immobility beyond movement: beyond standing up, there is sitting down, and beyond sitting down, lying down, beyond which one finally dissipates.

  Gilles Deleuze

  Lying, Law, Sitting Down

  Gilles Deleuze (2005). “Francis Bacon”, p.29, A&C Black

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.

  Edward Albee

  Running, Cities, Not Interested

  9 Copy quote

• Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.

  Edward Albee

  Going Away, Unions, Stuff

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Samuel Beckett once said, "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness." ...On the other hand, he SAID it.

  Art Spiegelman

  Hands, Silence, Unnecessary

  9 Copy quote

• There's always a host of voices you're inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He's one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens.

  Dylan Moran

  Voice, Literature, Singers

  4 Copy quote

• These are your beautiful days, Julia Beckett," he promised softly.

  Susanna Kearsley

  Beautiful, Julia, Your Beautiful

  Susanna Kearsley (2009). “Mariana”, p.268, Allison & Busby

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Artist, Cages, Indifferent

  7 Copy quote

• Opens up a whole new view of Beckett. The strong mutual attraction between Beckett and Cunard may help explain the leftist political views he expressed both in these superb and long-neglected translations for Negro and elsewhere in his work.

  Barney Rosset

  Strong, Views, Mutual Attraction

  4 Copy quote

• Waiting for Godot was not allowed. Neither was Henry Miller. The Soviets condemned them both. Miller would have been used as an example of decadence, being a very good analyst of how terrible and monstrous American culture was. That they liked, but they wouldn't publish him. I guess it must have been the sex. With Beckett, it must have been the hopelessness.

  Barney Rosset

  Sex, Waiting, Example

  8 Copy quote

• Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot,' billed as 'the laugh sensation of two continents,' made its American debut at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, in Miami, Florida, in 1956. My father, Bert Lahr, was playing Estragon, one of the two bowler-hatted tramps who pass the time in a lunar landscape as they wait in vain for the arrival of a Mr. Godot.

  John Lahr

  Father, Florida, Two

  "Panic Attack". www.newyorker.com. May 18, 2009.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• You got used to running things on your own." "What could he do about it when he's in Iraq and the car breaks down in Kansas?" Beckett gave her a long, quiet look. "I'm not in Iraq." "No, and it has to be said, I'm not in Kansas anymore." She lifted her hands, then let them fall. "It's not that I've forgotten how to be a couple, but that my experience in being part of one is different from yours. Maybe from most people's. And I've been on my own a long time." "Now you're not. I'm not fighting a war, and I'm right here." Needed to be here, he realized, with her.

  Nora Roberts

  Running, Couple, War

  9 Copy quote

• The one living playwright I admire without any reservation whatsoever is Samuel Beckett. I have funny feelings about almost all the others.

  Edward Albee

  Feelings, Having Fun, Reservations

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.54, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I was a very young student I loved and admired the work of Sam Beckett, who is famously pessimistic, and whose writing is an extraordinary examination of emptiness. I wanted to be like Beckett. I don't have the same attitude toward the world, I'm naturally optimistic, and so of course I could never be like Beckett. You can't force yourself to become like someone you admire.

  Michael Craig-Martin

  Attitude, Optimistic, Writing

  Source: www.artzip.org

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Australian Gerald Murnane, a genius on the level of Beckett, is known in Australia and Sweden but almost nowhere else. And I loved Reality Hunger, David Shields' recent novel take on the art of the novel.

  Teju Cole

  Art, Reality, Australia

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• My favourite writer is Beckett and I keep going back to wallow in his work like a deep pool of dark humour or like an oxygen tank when you can't breath in a world consumed by piety, hypocrisy and self-satisfaction.

  Simon Critchley

  Dark, Self, Oxygen

  4 Copy quote

• Samuel Beckett is the person that I read the most of - certainly the person whose books I own the most of. Probably 800 or 900, maybe 1,000 books of just Samuel Beckett. By him, about him, in different languages, etc. etc. Notebooks of his, letters of his that I own, personal letters - not to me, but I bought a bunch of correspondence of his. I love his humor, and I'm always blown away by his syntax and his ideas. So I keep reading those.

  John Larroquette

  Notebook, Reading, Ideas

  Source: www.avclub.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Like his admirer Samuel Beckett, Johnson locates his voices among conditions of such deprivation that even the most miserable memories are gilded by comparison: this paradox fuels equal parts of comedy and pathos. Never sentimental, at once corrosive and elegiac, House Mother Normal is a remarkable achievement.

  James Marcus

  Mother, Memories, Voice

  4 Copy quote

• I was in Hollis' band for eight years, playing drums. At one time we had Barry Beckett, Jimmy Johnson, David Hood - everybody but Roger Hawkins. We had a hell of a band.

  Donnie Fritts

  Eight, Years, Band

  "The Soulful DNA of Country Songwriter Donnie Fritts". Interview with Jacob Blickenstaff, www.motherjones.com. October 8, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice.

  Padgett Powell

  Book, Juice, Notable

  5 Copy quote

• In Kamby Bolongo Mean River damage and delusion walk hand in hand, and everything we think we know is gradually called into question. Reading like a cross between Samuel Beckett's 'The Calmative' and Gordon Lish's Dear Mr. Capote, Robert Lopez's new novel gets under your skin and latches on.

  Brian Evenson

  Reading, Mean, Thinking

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I admire [Samuel] Beckett, but I am totally against him. He seeks no improvement.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Improvement, Admire

  5 Copy quote

• [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

  4 Copy quote