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Samuel Beckett

b: Dublin, Ireland, Apr 13, 1906

d: Paris, France, Dec 22, 1989

Irish. Author. Dramatist. Noted for Waiting for Godot, 1952; won Obie for Play, 1963; won Nobel Prize, 1969.

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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.

Estragon(E): Why don't we hang ourselves? Vladimir(V): With what? E: You haven't got a bit of rope? V: No. E: Then we can't. V: Let's go. {from the play, 'Waiting for Godot.'}

Habit is a great deadener.

I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.

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.

Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.

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.

To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.