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
art adventure imagination
An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as reportage.
silence kind fine
Silence, yes, but what silence! For it is all very fine to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps.
silence identity goes-on
Where am I, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
moving void three
Enough. Sudden enough. Sudden all far. No move and sudden all far. All least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther. Best worse no farther. Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on.
crazy way born
We are all born crazy. Some remain that way.
lines unforgettable
What is that unforgettable line?
heart thinking escaping
And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.
unhappiness beckett endgame
Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.
mad waiting-for-godot godot
We all are born mad. Some remain so.
time night light
Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.
curiosity needs obscurity
And all these questions I ask myself. It is not in a spirit of curiosity. I cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.
our-generation somewhere-else laughing
The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased.
believe trying matter
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' You won't believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.
writing two waste
There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.