“To introduce people to a different world, to encounter the miracle of being, that is important.”
The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: To introduce people to a different world, to encounter the miracle of being, that is important. When I write “The train arrives at the station,” it is banal, but at the same time sensational, because it is invented.
“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: 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
“There are now many invisible people on stage.”
Stage directions in The Chairs (1952)
“People who don’t read are brutes. It is better to write than to make war, isn’t it?”
The Paris Review interview (1984)
“It isn't what people think that's important, but the reason they think what they think.”
As quoted in Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Time (1977) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 468; also in The Quantum Dice (1993) by Leonid Ivanovich Ponomarev, p. 50
le canular refers to hoaxes, humorous deceptions. -->
The Paris Review interview (1984)