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
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Samuel Beckett quotes
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.
Birth was the death of him.
Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better.
Habit is a great deadener.
How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones.
I can't go on. I'll go on.
I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.
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.
It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old down all the unchanging days, and die one day like any other day, only shorter.
James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.
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.
Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.
Make sense who may. I switch off.
My characters have nothing. I'm working with impotence, ignorance... that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable - something by definition incompatible with art.
Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!
Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.
Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.
Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.
The bastard! He doesn't exist!
The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.
There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.
To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
We are all born mad. Some remain so.
We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?
We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideals.
What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.
Words are all we have.
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