
“A scholar is like a book written in a dead language — it is not every one that can read in it.”
"Common Places," No. 13, The Literary Examiner (September - December 1823)
Source: The Hero of Ages
“A scholar is like a book written in a dead language — it is not every one that can read in it.”
"Common Places," No. 13, The Literary Examiner (September - December 1823)
The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929–1940 (2009), p. 362
Context: I think the next little bit of excitement is flying. I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them.
“It was not till quite late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say: "I don't know."”
Source: A Writer's Notebook (1946), p. 258
Salon interview (2000)
“Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it.”
Source: Northanger Abbey
Response to a would be biographer in 1980, as quoted in "When Stephen met Sylvia" in The Guardian (24 April 2004) http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1201328,00.html
Context: I am very honoured by your wanting to write a life of me. But the fact is I regard my life as rather a failure in the only thing in which I wanted it to succeed. I have not written the books I ought to have written and I have written a lot of books I should not have written. My life as lived by me has been interesting to me but to write truthfully about it would probably cause much pain to people close to me — and I always feel that the feelings of the living are more important than the monuments of the dead.