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 philosophy should-have
We should have thought of it when the world was young, in the nineties.
art philosophy reality
Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards.
art philosophy dust
The dust will not settle in our time. And when it does some great roaring machine will come and whirl it all skyhigh again.
art philosophy history
That's what hell must be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead.
art philosophy history
We could have saved sixpence. We could have saved fivepence. But at what cost?
generous thieves
For why be discouraged, one of thieves was saved, that is a generous percentage.
remain
We are all born mad. Some remain so.
silence
Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on
suffering artistic conditions
Suffering is the main condition of the artistic experience.
writing want ends
I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end.
reality self
The reality of the individualis an incoherent reality and must be expressed incoherently.
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.
knowledge knowing pessimism
Enough to know no knowing.
art stars moon
The time is perhaps not altogether too green for the vile suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear, and more than the light of day (or night) makes the subsolar, -lunar, and -stellar excrement. Art is the sun, moon, and stars of the mind, the whole mind.