Beckett Quotes

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

  Val Kilmer

  Play, Saws, Firsts

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

  Harold Pinter

  Light, Literature, Appreciated

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• Artemis: "Right, brothers. Onward. Imagine yourself seated at a cafe in Montmartre." Myles: "In Paris." Artemis: "Yes, Paris. And try as you will, you cannot attract the waiter's attention. What do you do?" Beckett: "Umm...tell Butler to jump-jump-jump on his head?" Myles: "I agree with simple-toon." Artemis: "No! You simply raise one finger and say clearly 'ici, garcon.'" Beckett: "Itchy what?

  Eoin Colfer

  Brother, Simple, Paris

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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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• 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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• 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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• I’m too young and ridiculous a person to speak for my generation, but I’d be happy to talk about my own experiences as a generation Y writer. I was raised by a generation of hippies. Throughout my childhood, teachers urged me to fight the establishment. My English teacher assigned Ginsberg and Kerouac and declared Bob Dylan “a genius.” My science teacher told me that television was “the new opiate of the masses” and bragged about never having owned one. My drama teacher made us perform Beckett.

  Simon Rich

  Teacher, Drama, Hippie

  "Ridiculously Rich: The Rumpus Interview With Simon Rich". Interview with Maureen Miller, therumpus.net. June 9, 2010.

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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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• 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

  Book, Brave, Portraits

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• 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

  Modern, Joyce, Wells

  Source: www.litkicks.com

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• [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

  Artist, Thinking, Sometimes

  Source: www.theguardian.com

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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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• When the animal becomes human, the effect is pleasingly benign and we laugh outloud, "Okay come clean now. This isn't really about hunting, is it?" But when the human becomes animal, the effect is disgusting, and if we laugh at all, then it is what Beckett calls the "mirthless laugh", which laughs at that which is unhappy.

  Simon Critchley

  Animal, Hunting, Laughing

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• The conversation with the dead is one of the great pleasures of life. Somebody who is sitting reading Chekhov, Beckett, reading Toni Morrison - you are not in any way dead, in many ways you are intensely alive.

  Cornel West

  Reading, Sitting, Alive

  Source: genius.com

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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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