Top 100 Quotes About Samuel Beckett
#1. Samuel Beckett wrote, "Fail, fail again. Fail better.
Keith Ferrazzi
#2. Ben Marcus has created an innovative and unflinching portrait of the turmoil of the human condition, providing the reader a most rare gift: something truly new. Notable American Women contains strains of Donald Antrim and Samuel Beckett but is beholden to neither; it is a brave, original book.
Myla Goldberg
#3. Discovering Samuel Beckett in college was a big deal for me. I realized you could be very funny and very dark at the same time.
Billy Collins
#4. [Abbas Kiarostami] is a great artist and a poet. I sometimes think that if Samuel Beckett made films, he'd make them like Kiarostami makes them.
Anthony Minghella
#5. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." - Samuel Beckett
Pema Chodron
#6. Samuel Beckett was saying, in a new biography, that he could remember being in the womb, which, of course, is a bit far-fetched. But he's an Irishman, so nothing's too far-fetched.
Frank McCourt
#7. When we are reading, a voice comes to us as in the dark and whispers, "Imagine!" Samuel Beckett
as told by Bill Moyer in the Foreword he wrote for, The Public Library: A Photographic Essay by Robert Dawson. Afterword by Ann Patchett
Samuel Beckett
#8. He [Samuel Beckett] is great, a very great writer. Any modern writer is bound to be influenced by [James] Joyce. Of course, by Beckett as well.
William S. Burroughs
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. In many ways, women are death's natural companions. Every time a woman gives birth, she is creating not only a life, but a death. Samuel Beckett wrote that women "give birth astride of a grave." Mother Nature is indeed a real mother, creating and destroying in a constant loop.
Caitlin Doughty
#12. I just completed a long car trip on a Sunday in August with two small children, which believe me is enough to convince you that Samuel Beckett was right about everything.
Lev Grossman
#13. I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.
Edward Albee
#14. 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
#15. Her smile was like a Samuel Beckett play - easy to read but difficult to interpret.
Bob Smith
#16. Samuel Beckett's estate will not license productions of his plays that are not performed as written.
Terry Teachout
#17. The first play I saw was a Samuel Beckett play which was great.
Val Kilmer
#18. Samuel Beckett once said, "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."
...On the other hand, he SAID it.
Art Spiegelman
#19. Let me have men about me that are fat,
... Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.
"You're on Earth. There's no cure for that." - - Samuel Beckett
William Shakespeare
#20. Nor did he think of Celia any more, though he could sometimes remember having dreamt of her. If only he had been able to think of her, he would not have needed to dream of her.
Samuel Beckett
#22. I was out of sorts. They are deep, my sorts, a deep ditch, and I am not often out of them.
Samuel Beckett
#24. How all becomes clear and simple when one opens an eye on the within, having of course previously exposed it to the without, in order to benefit by the contrast.
Samuel Beckett
#25. Suffering is the main condition of the artistic experience.
Samuel Beckett
#26. Love, that is all I asked, a little love, daily, twice daily, fifty years of twice daily love like a Paris horse-butcher's regular, what normal woman wants affection?
Samuel Beckett
#27. I smell you off him, she screamed, he stinks of bitch.
Samuel Beckett
#28. At last I began to think, that is to say to listen harder.
Samuel Beckett
#29. How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?
Samuel Beckett
#30. Don't wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto.
Samuel Beckett
#32. POZZO: I am blind. (Silence.) ESTRAGON: Perhaps he can see into the future.
Samuel Beckett
#33. Can it be out of discretion, and a reluctance to hurt, that they affect to be unaware of my existence? But this is a refinement of feeling which can hardly be attributed to the dogs that come pissing against my abode, apparently never doubting that it contains some flesh and bones.
Samuel Beckett
#34. The loss of my sight was a great fillip. If I could go deaf and dumb I think I might pant on to be a hundred.
Samuel Beckett
#35. I open the door of the cell and go. I am so bowed I only see my feet, if I open my eyes, and between my legs a little trail of black dust. I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit.
Samuel Beckett
#36. Vladimir: I don't understand.
Estragon: Use your intelligence, can't you?
Vladimir uses his intelligence.
Vladimir: (finally) I remain in the dark.
Samuel Beckett
#37. I love order. It's my dream. A world where all would be silent and still, and each thing in its last place, under the last dust.
Samuel Beckett
#38. Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.
Samuel Beckett
#40. But all this was nothing compared to the face which I regret to say vaguely resembled my own, less the refinement of course, same little abortive moustache, same little ferrety eyes, same paraphimosis of the nose, and a thin red mouth that looked as if it was raw from trying to shit its tongue.
Samuel Beckett
#42. 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.
Samuel Beckett
#43. I speak for an art ... weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.
Samuel Beckett
#44. The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.
Samuel Beckett
#45. I have always been amazed at my contemporaries' lack of finesse, I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself.
Samuel Beckett
#46. 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.
Samuel Beckett
#49. This version of the facts having been restored, it only remains to say it is no better than the other and no less incompatible with the kind of creature I might just conceivably have been if they had known how to take me. So let us consider now what really occurred.
Samuel Beckett
#50. Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me, in fact I feel more at home with the latter, having breathed deep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years.
Samuel Beckett
#52. But it is useless to dwell on this period of my life. If I go on long enough calling that my life I'll end up by believing it.
Samuel Beckett
#53. Yes, I dont know why, but I have never been disappointed, and I often was in the early days, without feeling at the same time, or a moment later, an undeniable relief.
Samuel Beckett
#55. It sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger.
Samuel Beckett
#56. you don't feel a mouth on you, you don't feel your mouth any more, no need of a mouth, the words are everywhere, inside me, outside me...
Samuel Beckett
#57. Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and going. From the word go.
Samuel Beckett
#58. My way is in the sand flowing
between the shingle and the dune
the summer rain rains on my life
on me my life harrying fleeing
to its beginning to its end
Samuel Beckett
#59. I have spoken softly, gone my ways softly, all my days, as behoves one who has nothing to say, nowhere to go, and so nothing to gain by being seen or heard.
Samuel Beckett
#60. What I need now is stories, it took me a long time to know that, and I'm not sure of it.
Samuel Beckett
#61. To every man his little cross. Till he dies. And is forgotten.
Samuel Beckett
#62. ... where gradually as you peered trying to make it out gradually of all things a face appeared ...
Samuel Beckett
#64. I don't know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I'll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.
Samuel Beckett
#65. Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.
Samuel Beckett
#66. Having oscillated all his life between the torments of a superficial loitering and the horrors of disinterested endeavour, he finds himself at last in a situation where to do nothing exclusively would be an act of the highest value, and significance.
Samuel Beckett
#67. Let's go." "We can't." "Why not?" "We're waiting for Godot.
Samuel Beckett
#68. I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.
Samuel Beckett
#69. Misfortunes, blessings, I have no time to pick my words, I am in a hurry to be done. And yet no, I am in no hurry.
Samuel Beckett
#70. Name, no, nothing is nameable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don't know, I shouldn't have begun.
Samuel Beckett
#71. We spend our life, it's ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench
Samuel Beckett
#72. For he who has once had to listen will listen always, whether he knows he will never hear anything again, or whether he does not. In other words, they like other words, no doubt about it, silence once broken will never again be whole.
Samuel Beckett
#73. VLADIMIR: What do they say? ESTRAGON: They talk about their lives. VLADIMIR: To have lived is not enough for them. ESTRAGON: They have to talk about it.
Samuel Beckett
#74. And what I have, what I am, is enough, was always enough for me, and as far as my dear little sweet little future is concerned I have no qualms, I have a good time coming.
Samuel Beckett
#75. 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.
Samuel Beckett
#76. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.
Samuel Beckett
#77. To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day?
Samuel Beckett
#78. He imagines that when I see him indefatigable I'll regret my decision. Such is his miserable scheme. As though I were short of slaves!
Samuel Beckett
#79. From things about to disappear I turn away in time. To watch them out of sight, no, I can't do it.
Samuel Beckett
#80. Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing.
Samuel Beckett
#81. Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can't tell them to you?
Samuel Beckett
#82. The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.
Samuel Beckett
#83. The short winter's day was drawing to a close. It seems to me sometimes that these are the only days I have ever known, and especially that most charming moment of all, just before night
wipes them out.
Samuel Beckett
#84. Nothing to do but stretch out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for all eternity.
Samuel Beckett
#85. James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.
Samuel Beckett
#86. HAMM
Open the window.
CLOV
What for?
HAMM
I want to hear the sea.
CLOV
You wouldn't hear it.
HAMM Even if you opened the window?
CLOV
No.
HAMM
Then it's not worth opening it?
CLOV
No.
HAMM(violently)
Then open it!
Samuel Beckett
#87. There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.
Samuel Beckett
#88. Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.
Samuel Beckett
#89. Women are all the bloody sameyou can't love for five minutes without wanting it abolished in brats and house bloody wifery.
Samuel Beckett
#90. If I had the use of my body, I would throw it out the window.
Samuel Beckett
#91. Where you have nothing, there you should want nothing.
Samuel Beckett
#93. Estragon: You see, you feel worse when I'm with you. I feel better alone, too.
Vladmir: Then why do you always come crawling back?
Estragon: I don't know.
Samuel Beckett
#95. 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.
Samuel Beckett
#96. I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.
Samuel Beckett
#97. Seen no matter how and said as seen. Dread of black. Of white. Of void. Let her vanish. And the rest. For good.
Samuel Beckett
#98. I feel the old dark gathering, the solitude preparing, by which I know myself, and the call of that ignorance which might be noble and is mere poltroonery.
Samuel Beckett
#99. In order to be company he must display a certain mental activity. But it need not be of a high order. Indeed it might be argued the lower the better. Up to a point. The lower the order of mental activity the better the company. Up to a point.
Samuel Beckett
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