Quote

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.

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
Else
Criticism
Intended
Nothing
Accept
Joke
Matter
Among
Fundamental
Work
Accepting
Fundamentals
Made
Responsibility
Provide
Overtones
People
Possible
Sounds
Headaches
Literature
Fully
Aspirin
Sound
Jokes
Headache

More quotes by Samuel Beckett

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The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.
Samuel Beckett
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Estragon: Nothing to be done.
Samuel Beckett
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Humbly to ask a favour of people who are on the point of knocking your brains out sometimes produces good results.
Samuel Beckett
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Birth was the death of him.
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I marshalled the words and opened my mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended.
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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.
Samuel Beckett
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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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Adulterers, take warning, never admit.
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Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.
Samuel Beckett
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The blind have no notion of time. The things of time are hidden from them too.
Samuel Beckett
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Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end.
Samuel Beckett
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That penny farthing hell you call your mind
Samuel Beckett
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The old endless chain of love, tolerance, indifference, aversion and disgust
Samuel Beckett
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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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The time is perhaps not altogether too green for the vile suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear, and more than the light of day (or night) makes the subsolar, -lunar, and -stellar excrement. Art is the sun, moon, and stars of the mind, the whole mind.
Samuel Beckett
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The short winter’s day was drawing to a close. It seems to me sometimes that these are the only days I have ever known, and especially that most charming moment of all, just before night wipes them out.
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How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life.
Samuel Beckett
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My keepers, why keepers, I'm in no danger of stirring an inch, ah I see, it's to make me think I'm a prisoner, frantic with corporeality, rearing to get out and away.
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Words fail, there are times when even they fail.
Samuel Beckett
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[T]he syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.
Samuel Beckett