“People always try to find base motives behind every good action.”
The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.
The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: I found ancestors, like Shakespeare, who said, in Macbeth, that the world is full of sound and fury, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. Macbeth is a victim of fate. So is Oedipus. But what happens to them is not absurd in the eyes of destiny, because destiny, or fate, has its own norms, its own morality, its own laws, which cannot be flouted with impunity. Oedipus sleeps with his Mummy, kills his Daddy, and breaks the laws of fate. He must pay for it by suffering. It is tragic and absurd, but at the same time it’s reassuring and comforting, since the idea is that if we don’t break destiny’s laws, we should be all right. Not so with our characters. They have no metaphysics, no order, no law. They are miserable and they don’t know why. They are puppets, undone. In short, they represent modern man. Their situation is not tragic, since it has no relation to a higher order. Instead, it’s ridiculous, laughable, and derisory.
The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: Beckett shows death; his people are in dustbins or waiting for God. (Beckett will be cross with me for mentioning God, but never mind.) Similarly, in my play The New Tenant, there is no speech, or rather, the speeches are given to the Janitor. The Tenant just suffocates beneath proliferating furniture and objects — which is a symbol of death. There were no longer words being spoken, but images being visualized. We achieved it above all by the dislocation of language. … Beckett destroys language with silence. I do it with too much language, with characters talking at random, and by inventing words.
As quoted in The Writer's Quotation Book : A Literary Companion (1980) by James Charlton, p. 44
“That's how we stay young these days: murder and suicide.”
Source: Man With Bags
“Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.”
As quoted in Sunbeams : A Book of Quotations (1990) by Sy Safransky
“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.”
Découvertes (1970), as quoted in Choosing the Future : The Power of Strategic Thinking (1997) by Stuart Wells, p. 15
“I'll never waste my dreams by falling asleep. Never again.”
Source: Man With Bags
The Paris Review interview (1984)
The Paris Review interview (1984)
The Paris Review interview (1984)
“Pray to the I don't-know-who
I hope : Jesus Christ.”
Prier le Je Ne Sais Qui
J'espère : Jesus-Christ.
Inscription on his tombstone.
Variant translation: Pray to the I don't-know-who: Jesus Christ, I hope.
As quoted in Parasuicidality and Paradox : Breaking Through the Medical Model (2007) by Ross D. Ellenhorn, p. 55
“It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind.”
As quoted in Encyclopedia of World Biography (1998) edited by Suzanne Michele Bourgoin, Paula Kay Byers, Gale Research Inc, p. 132