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Beckett had an unerring light on things, which I much appreciated. -- Harold Pinter
The first play I saw was a Samuel Beckett play which was great. -- Val Kilmer
As Beckett said, it's not enough to die, one has to be forgotten as well. -- John Hurt
Food is a necessary component to life. People can live without Renoir, Mozart, Gaudi, Beckett, but they cannot live without food. -- Grant Achatz
I don't think there's been any writer like Samuel Beckett. He's unique. He was a most charming man and I used to send him my plays. -- Harold Pinter
Poets think in short lines. Unless you're Samuel Beckett, Twitter might be more difficult for novelists. -- Kenneth Goldsmith
I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running. -- Edward Albee
Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing. -- Anthony Burgess
According to Beckett's or Kafka's law, there is immobility beyond movement: beyond standing up, there is sitting down, and beyond sitting down, lying down, beyond which one finally dissipates. -- Gilles Deleuze
Kamby Bolongo Mean River is an original and fearless fiction. It bears genetic traces of Beckett and Stein, but Robert Lopez's powerful cadences and bleak, joyful wit are all his own. -- Sam Lipsyte
I was in Hollis' band for eight years, playing drums. At one time we had Barry Beckett, Jimmy Johnson, David Hood - everybody but Roger Hawkins. We had a hell of a band. -- Donnie Fritts
Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice. -- Padgett Powell
My favourite writer is Beckett and I keep going back to wallow in his work like a deep pool of dark humour or like an oxygen tank when you can't breath in a world consumed by piety, hypocrisy and self-satisfaction. -- Simon Critchley
Like his admirer Samuel Beckett, Johnson locates his voices among conditions of such deprivation that even the most miserable memories are gilded by comparison: this paradox fuels equal parts of comedy and pathos. Never sentimental, at once corrosive and elegiac, House Mother Normal is a remarkable achievement. -- James Marcus
People ask me all the time, "What are your influences? Are you trying to do Beckett?" It's like, "No, I'm trying to do me." Whatever that is. I don't know what that is, but that's the basis. I'm trying to be true and I'm trying to be honest. -- Charlie Kaufman
Ben Marcus has created an innovative and unflinching portrait of the turmoil of the human condition, providing the reader a most rare gift: something truly new. Notable American Women contains strains of Donald Antrim and Samuel Beckett but is beholden to neither; it is a brave, original book. -- Myla Goldberg
In Kamby Bolongo Mean River damage and delusion walk hand in hand, and everything we think we know is gradually called into question. Reading like a cross between Samuel Beckett's 'The Calmative' and Gordon Lish's Dear Mr. Capote, Robert Lopez's new novel gets under your skin and latches on. -- Brian Evenson
These are your beautiful days, Julia Beckett," he promised softly. -- Susanna Kearsley
I think he fucked me stupid"- McKenzie Matthews- Being Beckett's -- P.S. Berryman
Beckett's 'Stories and Texts for Nothing' is probably my favorite book. -- Franz Wright
Ibsen, Chekhov, Shakespeare, and Beckett to me are the most revolutionary. -- John Cameron Mitchell
I admire [Samuel] Beckett, but I am totally against him. He seeks no improvement. -- Jean-Paul Sartre
Samuel Beckett's estate will not license productions of his plays that are not performed as written. -- Terry Teachout
Her smile was like a Samuel Beckett play - easy to read but difficult to interpret. -- Bob Smith
All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. -- John Updike
[Contemporary writer] could be a kind of [Samuel] Beckett who would not be felt to be totally committed to despair. -- Jean-Paul Sartre
Food is a necessary component to life. People can live without Renoir, Mozart, Gaudi, Beckett, but they cannot live without food." -- Grant Achatz
Samuel Beckett once said, "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness." ...On the other hand, he SAID it. -- Art Spiegelman
The one living playwright I admire without any reservation whatsoever is Samuel Beckett. I have funny feelings about almost all the others. -- Edward Albee
[Abbas Kiarostami] is a great artist and a poet. I sometimes think that if Samuel Beckett made films, he'd make them like Kiarostami makes them. -- Anthony Minghella
Discovering Samuel Beckett in college was a big deal for me. I realized you could be very funny and very dark at the same time. -- Billy Collins
He [Samuel Beckett] is great, a very great writer. Any modern writer is bound to be influenced by [James] Joyce. Of course, by Beckett as well. -- William S. Burroughs
There's something hopeful about 'Endgame.' Beckett strips everything away and asks what remains. There's this surgical dissection of the soul, but at the bottom, you find shafts of light. -- Simon McBurney
I've played Beckett. I put on in the 1950s the first Australian production of 'Waiting for Godot.' I played Estragon. The most interesting conversation I've had about Beckett was with a Dublin taxi driver. -- Barry Humphries
Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union. -- Edward Albee
The Australian Gerald Murnane, a genius on the level of Beckett, is known in Australia and Sweden but almost nowhere else. And I loved Reality Hunger, David Shields' recent novel take on the art of the novel. -- Teju Cole
I belong to that generation who, as students, had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism. For me the break was first Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance. -- Michel Foucault
I went and saw him [ John Hurt ] here in L.A.He did a one-man Beckett show of Krapp's Last Tape. I went back and saw him afterwards, and what an actor he is. He is so gifted. -- Judd Nelson
The conversation with the dead is one of the great pleasures of life. Somebody who is sitting reading Chekhov, Beckett, reading Toni Morrison - you are not in any way dead, in many ways you are intensely alive. -- Cornel West
There's always a host of voices you're inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He's one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens. -- Dylan Moran
Opens up a whole new view of Beckett. The strong mutual attraction between Beckett and Cunard may help explain the leftist political views he expressed both in these superb and long-neglected translations for Negro and elsewhere in his work. -- Barney Rosset
I have 800 books of just Samuel Beckett's work, tons of his correspondence, personal letters that he wrote. I have copies of plays he used when he directed, so all of his handwritten notes are in the corners of the page. -- John Larroquette
Telling Blake about Livia had not broken him. It had given him wings. Cole prayed for forgiveness for the jealousy he felt. He pulled out his phone and texted Beckett:He's playing! Like an angel. No Ave Maria.Beckett's reply came from ecstatic fingers:MdamttohAwebome!!!" -- Debra Anastasia
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s devoted Beckett readers greeted each successively shorter volume from the master with a mixture of awe and apprehensiveness; it was like watching a great mathematician wielding an infinitesimal calculus, his equations approaching nearer and still nearer to the null point. -- John Banville
Telling Blake about Livia had not broken him. It had given him wings. Cole prayed for forgiveness for the jealousy he felt. He pulled out his phone and texted Beckett:He's playing! Like an angel. No Ave Maria.Beckett's reply came from ecstatic fingers:MdamttohAwebome!!! -- Debra Anastasia
When the animal becomes human, the effect is pleasingly benign and we laugh outloud, "Okay come clean now. This isn't really about hunting, is it?" But when the human becomes animal, the effect is disgusting, and if we laugh at all, then it is what Beckett calls the "mirthless laugh", which laughs at that which is unhappy. -- Simon Critchley
Nothing is funnier than unhappiness. -- Samuel Beckett
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. -- Samuel Beckett
It's so nice to know where you're going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there. -- Samuel Beckett
All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. -- Samuel Beckett
It is useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it. -- Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot,' billed as 'the laugh sensation of two continents,' made its American debut at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, in Miami, Florida, in 1956. My father, Bert Lahr, was playing Estragon, one of the two bowler-hatted tramps who pass the time in a lunar landscape as they wait in vain for the arrival of a Mr. Godot. -- John Lahr

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