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To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.

Samuel Beckett

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Samuel Beckett
Age: 83 †
Born: 1906
Born: April 13
Died: 1989
Died: December 22
Artist
Author
Cricketer
Film Director
French Resistance Fighter
Intellectual
Linguist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Teacher
Dublin city
Samuel Barclay Beckett
Andrew Belis
Sam Beckett
Sa-miao-erh Pei-kʻo-tʻe
Samuel Beḳeṭ
Fail
Failure
Desertion
Failing
Housekeeping
Living
Shrink
Artist
Shrinks
Art
Craft
Good
Crafts
World
Dare

More quotes by Samuel Beckett

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There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle.
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The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.
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I have always been amazed at my contemporaries’ lack of finesse, I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself.
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And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.
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What are we doing here, that is the question.
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That penny farthing hell you call your mind
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Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence.
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Don’t wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto.
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But it seems impossible to speak and yet say nothing, you think you have succeeded, but you always overlook something.
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I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous, and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. 'Nothing is more real than nothing.' They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark.
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Over, over, there is a soft place in my heart for all that is over, no, for the being over, words have been my only loves, not many.
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The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on.
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Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end.
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My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin.
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Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.
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Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.
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But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.
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Love requited is a short circuit.
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To him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth.
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It is better to adopt the simplest explanation, even if it is not simple, even if it does not explain very much. A bright light is not necessary, a taper is all one needs to live in strangeness, if it faithfully burns.
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