Great Beckett Quotes & Sayings

Why then the human voice, rather than a hyena's howls or the clanging of a hammer? Answer, so that the shock may not be too great, when the writhings of true lips meet his gaze. Between them they find a rejoinder to everything. And how they enjoy talking, they know there is no worse torment, for one not in the conversation. — Samuel Beckett

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

I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, in control of one's material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, subtracting rather than adding. When I first met Joyce, I didn't intend to be a writer. That only came later when I found out that I was no good at all at teaching. When I found I simply couldn't teach. But I do remember speaking about Joyce's heroic achievement. I had a great admiration for him. That's what it was: epic, heroic, what he achieved. I realized that I couldn't go down that same road. — Samuel Beckett

The sensation of the seat of a chair coming together with his drooping posteriors at last was so delicious that he rose at once and repeated the sit, lingeringly and with intense concentration. Murphy did not so often meet with these tendernesses that he could afford to treat them casually. The second sit, however, was a great disappointment. — Samuel Beckett

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

I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck. That is a great measure of freedom, for him who has not the pioneering spirit. And from the poop, poring upon the wave, a sadly rejoicing slave, I follow with my eyes the proud and futile wake. Which, as it bears me from no fatherland away, bears me onward to no shipwreck. — Samuel Beckett

Habit is a great deadener. — Samuel Beckett

The bicycle is a great good. But it can turn nasty, if ill employed. — Samuel Beckett

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

The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness around me I feel less alone. (Pause.) In a way. (Pause.) I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to ... (hesitates) ... me. (Pause.) — Samuel Beckett

A work of art is great to the extent that to encounter it is to be changed. — Wendy Beckett

You lean back against the door with bowed head making ready to set out. By the time you open your eyes your feet have disappeared and the skirt of your great coat come to rest on the surface of the snow. The dark scene seems lit from below. You see yourself at the last outset leaning against the door with closed eyes waiting for the word from you to go. To be gone.Then the snowlit scene. You lie in the dark with closed eyes and see yourself there as described making ready to strike out and away across the expanse of light. You hear again the click of the door pulled gently to and the silence before the steps can start. Next thing you are on your way across the white pasture afrolic with lambs in spring and strewn with red placantae. — Samuel Beckett

The first play I saw was a Samuel Beckett play which was great. — Val Kilmer

But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows. — Samuel Beckett

Writing a great song is not a simple task, but I feel like when everything comes together and you sing it in a certain way that no-one else can sing it, when it's written in a certain way that's perfect for the way that you're performing it, that those are the things that make a song great. — William Beckett

I think that a great song needs the full package. I think that a great song needs everything from lyrics, to melody, to music, and it needs to be interesting and it needs take you in and swallow you and swish you around, and then regurgitate you back in better form. — William Beckett

I don't know when I died. It always seemed to me I died old, about ninety years old, and what years, and that my body bore it out, from head to foot. But this evening, alone in my icy bed, I have the feeling I'll be older than the day, the night, when the sky with all its lights fell upon me, the same I had so often gazed on since my first stumblings on the distant earth. For I'm too frightened this evening to listen to myself rot, waiting for the great red lapses of the heart, the tear sings at the caecal walls, and for the slow killings to finish in my skull, the assaults on unshakable pillars, the fornications with corpses. So I'll tell myself a story, I'll try and tell myself another story, to try and calm myself, and it's there I feel I'll be old, old, even older than the day I fell, calling for help, and it came. Or is it possible that in this story I have come back to life, after my death? No, it's not like me to come back to life, after my death. — Samuel Beckett

But it was not long before I found myself alone, in the dark. That is why I gave up trying to play and took to myself for ever shapelessness and speechlessness, incurious wondering, darkness, long stumbling with outstretched arms, hiding. Such is the earnestness from which, for nearly a century now, I have never been able to depart. From now on it will be different. I shall never do any thing any more from now on but play. No, I must not begin with an exaggeration. But I shall play a great part of the time, from now on, the greater part, if I can. But perhaps I shall not succeed any better than hitherto. Perhaps as hitherto I shall find myself abandoned, in the dark, without anything to play with. Then I shall play with myself. To have been able to conceive such a plan is encouraging. — Samuel Beckett

The dust will not settle in our time. And when it does some great roaring machine will come and whirl it all skyhigh again. — Samuel Beckett

Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly. But beyond this tumult there is a great calm, and a great indifference, never really to be troubled by anything again. — Samuel Beckett

Some hours later Cooper took the packet of ash from his pocket, where earlier in the evening he had put it for greater security, and threw it angrily at a man who had given him great offence. It bounced, burst, off the wall on to the floor, where at once it became the object of much dribbling, passing, trapping, shooting, punching, heading and even some recognition from the gentleman's code. By closing time the body, mind and soul of Murphy were freely distributed over the floor of the saloon; and before another dayspring greyened the earth had been swept away with the sand, the beer, the butts, the glass, the matches, the spits, the vomit. — Samuel Beckett

The Holy ... Machine?" I mumbled.
"Yes." She gave a little laugh. "A great miracle. He is a kind of robot, but God has given him a soul - and not an ordinary human soul either, but the soul of a saint or an angel!"
"But ... I thought robots were ... bad ... "
"Yes, of course, and Mary Magdalene was a whore. To God, all things are possible. — Chris Beckett

And Watt's need of semantic succour was at times so great that he would set to trying names on things, and on himself, almost as a woman hats. — Samuel Beckett

If continually people look and look and always come away enriched, then it's a great work — Wendy Beckett

We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. — Samuel Beckett

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. — Samuel Beckett

I can't see any great evidence that humans have any ability to access anything other than the material world. Beyond that, who knows, but there's no good evidence that would take me to any particular belief. — Bernard Beckett

All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them. — Jonathan Safran Foer

What is this love that more than all the cursed deadly or any other of its great movers so moves the soul and soul what is this soul that more than by any of its great movers is by love so moved? — Samuel Beckett

[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

Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union. — Edward Albee

Even farts made no impression on it. I can't help it, gas escapes from my fundament on the least pretext, it's hard not to mention it now and then, however great my distaste. One day I counted them. Three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours, or an average of over sixteen farts an hour. After all it's not excessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes. It's nothing. Not even one fart every four minutes. It's unbelievable. Damn it, I hardly fart at all, I should never have mentioned it. Extraordinary how mathematics help you to know yourself. — Samuel Beckett

The experiential test of whether this art is great or good, or minor or abysmal is the effect it has on your own sense of the world and of yourself. Great art changes you. — Wendy Beckett

All is ready. Except me. I am being given, if I may venture the expression, birth to into death, such is my impression. The feet are clear already, of the great cunt of existence. Favourable presentation I trust. My head will be the last to die. Haul in your hands. I can't. The render rent. My story ended I'll be living yet. Promising lag. That is the end of me. I shall say I no more. — Samuel Beckett

White world, great trouble, not a sound, only the embers, sound of dying, dying glow — Samuel Beckett

Go home, talk about it together. Bake Christmas cookies and crap. Then tell me what you want to happen. Know that I'm yours. My loyalty, my soul is yours no matter what you decide. Crap, you can shoot me in the back, and I'll never want anything but to be around you hookers."
Blake stood and shook his head. "Nah, I don't need time. I appreciate the place in Hawaii, and it would be great to go to - maybe for a vacation sometime? But I'm here. I'm not leaving you. You're my family. — Debra Anastasia

And in winter, under my greatcoat, I wrapped myself in swathes of newspaper, and did not shed them until the earth awoke, for good, in April. The Times Literary Supplement was admirably adapted to this purpose, of a neverfailing toughness and impermeability. Even farts made no impression on it. I can't help it, gas escapes from my fundament on the least pretext, it's hard not to mention it now and then, however great my distaste. One day I counted them. Three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours, or an average of over sixteen farts an hour. After all it's not excessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes. It's nothing. Not even one fart every four minutes. It's unbelievable. Damn it, I hardly fart at all, I should never have mentioned it. — Samuel Beckett

Our world is limited by the machinery we carry. It's very different to the 18th and 19th century Enlightenment scientists who were mostly men of God and thought it was their quest to uncover God's great plan. — Bernard Beckett

Henry: I usen't to need anyone, just to myself, stories, there was a great one about an old fellow called Bolton, I never finished it, I never finished any of them, I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever. (Pause.) — Samuel Beckett

All great art is a visual form of prayer. — Wendy Beckett

Poor Willie - running out - ah well - can't be helped - just one of those old things - another of those old things - just can't be cured - cannot be cured - ah yes - poor dear Willie - good Lord! - good God! - ah well - no worse - no better, no worse - no change - no pain - hardly any - great thing that - nothing like it - pure ... what? - what? - ah yes - poor Willie - no zest - for anything - no interest - in life - poor dear Willie - sleep for ever - marvellous gift - in my opinion - always said so - wish I had it — Samuel Beckett

And perhaps there is none, no morrow anymore, for one who has waited so long for it in vain. And perhaps he has come to that stage of his instant when to live is to wander the last of the living in the depths of an instant without bounds, where the light never changes and the wrecks all look alike. Bluer scarcely than white of egg the eyes stare into the space before them, namely the fullness of the great deep and unchanging calm. But at long intervals they close, with the gentle suddenness of flesh that tightens, often without anger, and closes on itself. — Samuel Beckett

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

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

But I pushed and pulled in vain, the wheels would not turn. It was as though the brakes were jammed, and heaven knows they were not, for my bicycle had no brakes. And suddenly overcome by a great weariness, in spite of the dying day when I always felt most alive, I threw the bicycle back in the bush and lay down on the ground, on the grass, careless of the dew, I never feared the dew. — Samuel Beckett

Normally I didn't see a great deal. I didn't hear a great deal either. I didn't pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn't there. Strictly speaking I believe I've never been anywhere. — Samuel Beckett

Actually, orders coming from me usually have motherfucker attached to them. I just treated you like a tender great aunt. I'm not afraid of you, but I have respect, like I would for a twenty-three-foot alligator residing in the goddamn sewer. Nothing's killed you yet, and you've lived through a lot of shit. You want to be in my life? Then you'll have to contend with how big my balls are. Beckett sighed. — Debra Anastasia

Astride of a grave and a difficult birth.
Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps.
We have time to grow old.
The air is full of our cries.
But habit is a great deadener.
At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing.
Let him sleep on. — Samuel Beckett

We know great art by its effect on us. If we are prepared to look without preconceptions, without defenses, without haste, then art will change us. — Wendy Beckett

Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be? He'll know nothing. He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot. (pause) Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. (Pause.) I can't go on! (Pause.) What have I said? — Samuel Beckett